It's very odd behavior. Calling people sociopaths who disagree with you politically is a very well-worn canard but it honestly seems like he's on the sociopathy spectrum; he hates on people without much pretense of justification and in ways that seem obviously harmful to his own reputation. Of course conservative pundits (and just pundits in general) perform fake or exaggerated hatreds for instrumental signaling reasons all of the time, but it's not clear how a guy with Hanania's career arc benefits from doing a bunch of dumb tribal conservative signals. He's almost certainly never going to be a regular Fox News guy, because he is a weird nerd with a weird voice who makes weird grimaces and gestures while thinking about stuff; his natural audience seems to be mostly liberals, or at least people who are not invested in dumb tribal conservative signaling culture. I personally don't really care that he seems like a complete asshole, or see that as a good reason to stop reading him, but I assume most liberals are not like that.
I guess he’s never seen a US software development team. Or a staff of hospital MDs. Or the crew that put new siding on my house. Or about 1/4 the population of the city I live in.
That's the point, fren. You are allowing faceless corporations to save a buck by hiring slightly cheaper and sometimes less skilled labor. This is good for the corporations, it's good for the immigrant employee who is making more than they would in their home country, and it's good for people who want their house sided for 10% cheaper than it would cost to have an American do it .. this system is not good for American workers who get laid off or miss out on training opportunities or are forced to work for less.... But I can read you better than that, you're _proud_ to live in a city that's 25% immigrant! (There are around 20 US cities with foreign born population that high and not a single one of them is doing what I would consider "well"), but regardless you make it clear that your concerns don't lie with the American workers ... Another group I guess that I could mention that is severely impacted by this strategy is... Literally everyone else. Did you know that India has been struggling with a severe shortage of doctors and healthcare workers for several decades now? Currently India has about 5 doctors and 6 nurses for every 10,000 citizens.. The World Health Organization has set a minimum acceptable threshold for doctors and nurses combined at 44.5/10,000. This is even further skewed when comparing rural India, which essentially just exists without medical intervention. Some villages literally chase away foreign healthcare workers with torches and pitchforks because it is such an abstract concept to them. Good job on getting some paneling put up on your house though, diversity is our strength says every fortune 500 company.
No I don’t think you have my number. You have a fabricated caricature of someone you imagine to be your enemy. I don’t watch cable news but I’ve now seen enough YouTube video of Tucker Carlson to know where the fabricated caricature originated.
I'm not even sure that Hanania is committing "whataboutism" here at all.
He's saying that the idea that the US must help Ukraine because it's a democracy fighting against a dictatorship is flawed, because Ukraine is not actually democratic. I don't know if it's true that it is not democratic. But if it's true, then what's wrong about Hanania's point? He does not claim to refute in that video all the possible reasons to support Ukraine, just a particular one.
Thank you for that, that's enough for not taking him seriously. He doesn't even know that previous Ukrainian president, Yanukovich, wasn't really overthrown. He fled, didn't show up to work.
Wouldn't that mean many eastern European states could continue lobbying?
Someone like Radosław Sikorski having influence in Washington would be Hanania's worst nightmare regarding US-Russian relations, a Liberal elite from a ex-Warsaw pact NATO member state.
It wasn't obvious to me that he makes that presumption. It's just that, if there is such a thing as international law, then the UN is it; and America doesn't do what the UN says; therefore the claim that the USA is promoting a law-abiding international order doesn't seem to stand up. I don't think there's a normative claim that it would be good to comply with the UNSC's rulings; only the empirical observation that the USA doesn't.
Those ordinary members of the public relied almost entirely on media pundits and government officials to form their opinions; they had no personal experience with Iraq or the Iraqi regime they could use to assess the claims they heard. So effectively the special interests controlled the majority opinion.
"Foreign policy elites are able to persuade the public, and then the government responds to popular opinion."
is very different from the claim:
"The government responds to foreign policy elites, regardless of popular opinion."
The first claim is how democracies are supposed to work. The government listens to the people. Experts try to persuade the public, and the ideas that persuade most people get enacted by the government. Maybe this isn't always the best idea, because democracy is messy, but as supporters of democracy we think it's better than all other systems.
This review seems to be claiming the second one. The government responds to the will of special interests, not to a grand strategy or to the public.
When it comes to domestic issues, like the economy, crime, education, abortion, immigration, etc, citizens can see what is going on with their own eyes, in their daily lives. That limits the power of media and "experts," and the special interests that fund them, because if their narrative diverges too far from reality it will become obvious. For example, if the media says crime is down, but I talk to store owners in my area and they all say they are suffering badly from shoplifting, I'll be at least somewhat skeptical of the media claims.
In contrast, ordinary people generally don't directly experience what is happening abroad. If the media and the experts say Slevobia's government is oppressive and has WMDs, there's not much I can do to verify whether that's true. Having never been to Slevobia, and knowing nothing about its language, culture, history, or politics, I have no way to evaluate the claims I hear about it.
There are lots of issues which are important, but which most citizens don't have personal experience with. For example: There are 1,000 cases of a new disease in the country, so how should we respond?
What should then happen in a democracy is a public debate. Different groups propose different solutions to the problem (including "Do nothing") and try to persuade as many people as possible. If some group is able to persuade a majority of the population that <X> is the right action, then the government should respond by doing <X>. That's what a government that represents the people should do.
Now maybe what the public wants is the wrong choice. In which case, the people who know better should try to do a better job of convincing more people.
Is the problem that the government listens to special interests instead of the people? Or is the problem that neoconservatives are really persuasive?
I find this argument a little odd. It's probably true that many Americans couldn't fund Ukraine on a map before the war, and we rely a lot on journalists to know what's happening there. However, surely what the media reports has something to do with what is actually happening, and reporting the basic facts about Russia invading Ukraine is something we can count on the media to do.
This isn't just an opinion of experts. While we shouldn't naively assume that what's reported in the news is just reality, but neither does it have nothing to do with reality.
There is also some (limited) cross-checking via social media. We can't verify what's going ourselves, but many Europeans can. Many people know someone from Ukraine well enough to talk to them. It's possible to post pictures on Twitter, and other people can geolocate them. And so on.
Thanks to the Internet, we actually do have reasonably good communications with people in many other countries, including Ukraine. It seems weird to ignore that?
Could you cite an example of the first kind of error? My best attempt at using ctrl + f to scan for the mostly likely words to get misused this way failed.
e.g. "any leader willing to dismantle their WMD program and ally themselves with the US in the war on terror *were* destined to be killed" asterisks mine
Thanks. I just wanted to check that it wasn't a "collective noun" type of situation. Funnily enough, I did use "were" as a keyword, but I guess "leader" was too far away from it for me to notice while doing a quick scan.
- The book's examples of public choice failure include some classics (corporations, foreign powers), but also some strange ones. Ukraine is a public choice failure because . . . the American people really support Ukraine, and the government acted on this? Iraq was a public choice failure because the neoconservative movement, which included most of the national security establishment, was behind it? Maybe the full book had this, or maybe people who actually understand PCT know all this stuff already, but I would have appreciated more of a background in what makes something a PCT failure as opposed to just democracy as usual. Is any incorrect decision always a PCT failure?
- I know at least one of the "sanctions caused massive death toll" studies turned out to be embarrassingly fake and wrong, I don't know about the others.
- Even if sanctions don't postemptively cause regime change, the threat of sanctions still acts as a deterrent. I wonder if Hanania is also against mass incarceration, another policy that inflicts punishments that cause a lot of suffering on people but which we still do in the hopes of deterring bad behavior.
> The Ghost of Kiev was clearly fictional from the beginning, yet it was repeated breathlessly and all critics were dismissed as 'Putin apologists'.
In my circle the most rabid Ukraine supporters were making fun of this claims.
Oryx (the one with tracker of confirmed losses) from start dismissed similar stupidity as low quality propaganda.
> Meanwhile, pointing out indisputably true facts got you banned or labeled and shadowbanned. See: biolabs in Ukraine
Depends on what you mean by that, some forms (USA makes biological weapons at border with Russia!!!!!1 Confirmed1!!!!1) variety were uncritically repeating Russian propaganda. And actually true was irrelevant and not very interesting.
Is there evidence that sanctions act as a deterrent? Usually leaders get more popular in wartime. The poor and middle class will suffer but Putin can still have anything he wants*.
* except international vacations, but that can be accomplishes by just denying visas to powerful politicians.
Depend what the goal is. To quote one Russian Academic:
"What would moral crusade oriented sanctions look like? Inflict economic damage, so that population revolts and overthrows the regime. That's an imbecile idea that never really worked and probably never will. Goal-oriented sanctions look differently. Maximise systemic shock in order to paralyse technological chains. That will lead to a military defeat, which will entail the fall of regime. That's a great idea which usually works. It worked out with the USSR for example"
Like he says, depends on what the goal is. Sanctions dont work to weaken a dictator's grip on his own country, but they make work to weaken the ability to project power and maintain a military capable of foreign operations. Military spending may go up, but if general technology, economy, and resources go down, the quality of said military and its ability to adapt, project force, build new weapons systems, etc might go down. The relative quality of Saddam's army no doubt went down from the time of the Iraq War to Operation Enduring Freedom or whatever.
Deterrence is also an important goal. Setting the norm that of you invade a sovereign state without provocation your economy will be destroyed and you'll become an international pariah seems like a useful thing if you want less of that to happen in the future.
Russia's economy is significantly reduced in size and their ability to operate in international institutions has been destroyed. Having a lot less resources and power seems to rather limit "getting what he wants" as he has less power to effect the world. Unless you are talking about the purely personal level. In which case it's irrelevant.
>Unless you are talking about the purely personal level. In which case it's irrelevant.
A lot of people I've talked to in person who seem very emotionally invested in their opposition to Putin seem to believe that the sanctions will harm him at the personal level, and that he does care about how many billions he has in his bank account more than he cares about adding "Conquerer/Re-uniter of Ukraine" to his biography.
They're so divorced from the worldview of "Imperialism" if you will that they're seemingly incapable of considering someone for whom "personal fortune" is not a primary motivator. And they don't seem to understand that being the autocrat of a country of 140M people puts you in the same relative status position whether you have $10 billion or $1 Billion.
Would apartheid South Africa be a good example of sanctions working?
Difficult to say, because many other factors were in play and apartheid would have ended eventually with or without sanctions. And that's the problem; it's not obvious when sanctions work, only when they fail.
It's also worth noting that sanctions against Iraq pretty much made it impossible for Iraq to fight back militarily against the US in any sort of meaningful way, and Japan attacked the US during WWII because US sanctions on Japan made the Japanese position untenable in the long term, which then led to the US entering and winning World War II.
In the book, there's a detailed discussion about studies on the effects of sanctions, you're right that some of them are bad. I talk about the uncertainty, and provide a more moderate estimate for Iraq in the 1990s than what has been reported. The chapter on sanctions is derived from an earlier report I did for the Cato Institute, so you can get most of the arguments here.
The anti-sanctions discourse relies on flashy studies with high death counts, but we shouldn't ignore the massive economic damage, which is more certain and also a major problem.
As for sanctions acting as a deterrent, it's plausible, though hard to prove. They don't work in the vast majority of specific cases where they're applied, which is usually the justification for sanctions in each specific case. I can't prove it, but I suspect that governments that really value economic growth have other reasons not to engage in bad behavior, while those that don't care about economic growth like North Korea are not going to change their behavior based on sanctions. If you look at specific cases, the US usually doesn't give the target regime a path to get out from under sanctions (or even talk to it at all!), and it sure looks like punishment for psychological and political reasons rather than like it's directed towards any goal. If sanctions do accomplish something in deterring bad behavior among others, it's probably by accident more than design.
All the classics are good, but I've never felt a deep dive into PCT was really all that necessary. The most important ideas are pretty simple to grasp, yet provide a great framework through which to understand politics.
Scott's blog is not some hidden corner of the internet far away from the public eye. Like it or not (And I'm going to assume he likes it, or at least appreciates the supplemental substack income) Scott is a minor internet celebrity and is often a bigger name than the authors of most of the books reviewed. There isn't a lot to be done about this, except for shutting the blog down (But in a more permeant way that doesn't result in it coming back twice as big...again).
I think you might have misunderstood my comment. It’s just rare to have the author of the book being reviewed directly responding to comments on a review of that book. No shade on anyone intended. It felt like a bit of, I dunno, recursion? A strange loop?
Surely, focusing on case studies where sanctions occur is incredibly misleading if the "purpose" of sanctions is deterrent. Shouldn't you be focusing on when a "bad" state wants to do something but doesn't because of the threat of sanctions? I am unaware of any research on this, but I do want to note that this seems like a very poor methodology.
There isn’t a good methodology that I’ve seen that can answer that question. I’d say the burden of proof is on those who want to wreck the living standards of other countries.
Your linked article is a great overview of the sanctions lit and goes further, highly recommended, thank you.
The part of the academic sanctions critique I struggle with is the implication that we have, in the paradigmatic case, a strong moral obligation to continue economic entanglements with genocidal authoritarians.
We get to that part of the analysis and I throw up my hands, assuming we must have failed to carry a two at some point.
Best I can figure is that a first-order utilitarianism (failing to consider moral hazards) just leads to perverse results in hostage crises, and international human rights issues often pose similar problems. (For example, Saddam exploited concerns about sanctions impacts by diverting permitted aid from vulnerable populations, exacerbating the impact and fueling further critiques. If the critique is compelling, if we suspend sanctions once a country starves enough of its population, it creates a pretty bloody equilibrium.)
Hopefully I'm making a basic error that's obvious to someone better versed in this domain. Maybe there are other strong proven tools for compellence and deterrence we're leaving on the table?
What am I missing?
(Despite this small gap in views, genuinely appreciate your work and comments, thanks.)
For most of American history, the federal government let people deal with pretty much whoever they wanted to abroad except in wartime. It was caveat emptor, the US wouldn't bail you out if you got in trouble, but you could seek business opportunities abroad. So there's no affirmative obligation for the US gov to do things with other countries, it should just get out of the way.
Furthermore, I think there's a mistake to simply group leaders into a "genocidal dictators" category and a non-genocidal dictator category. Leaders when they do bad things are usually responding to some kind of threat, when we increase the threat to them we make atrocities more likely, this is I argue what happened in Syria.
Given how the US reacted to 9/11, I'd hate to see what we would do if religious fundamentalists took over large swaths of our country, like they did in Syria.
That September 2020 piece gives me a much clearer picture of your views. I'd urge all other commenters read it.
You level a powerful critique of the madman theory--that some foreign leaders are simply raving psychopaths trying to maximally harm others even when idle.
Even so, some communists purge the doctors while others don't. So I'm still grappling with how far this takes me.
Outside influences are a factor, sure, and sometimes the West has really naive expectations about what concessions are possible or realistic. I think those are both really powerful points.
I remain separately concerned about moral hazards. From your article:
"The literature consistently shows that mass killing is rare because states would rather not engage in it. A regime committing atrocities can find itself an international pariah..."
Sorry for the unfair quotation, but that seems noteworthy!
If instead troubled states get more engagement and assistance, the incentives could flip.
Your initial appeal to historical American precedent and federal interference with business is well taken, just too much to unpack there, I'll definitely reflect on it.
My key update: I'll pledge to push back against "pure madman theory" when I encounter it, even though I suspect there are some softer variations that might slip past the arguments you've laid out so far.
You've been very generous with your time, thank you.
> we shouldn't ignore the massive economic damage, which is more certain and also a major problem
So you agree that sanctions can at least cause this?
Do you agree that massive economic damage is reducing ability of a country to wage modern war?
I think that answer is "yes, yes".
This is enough by itself for me to support sanctions on Russia (including ones more damaging to my own wealth than to Russian wealth, as long as this factor is not too large - say within 2).
Well, it seems that Russia has plenty of artillery and weapons, its limiting factor is manpower, which it needs to occupy land and territory. Putin seems unwilling to declare a general mobilization for domestic political reasons. If anything, American sanctions and hostility to Russia are probably making his job easier by unifying the country.
Modern ones are far more limited, especially things like precision-guided munitions, drones etc.
And current war results in massive losses of other equipment where their supply is also not infinite, and rebuilding more complicated. Hopefully soon their will lose enough equipment that mobilization would not help anyway.
If sanctions are making a dictator's job easier, I would expect dictators to make up stories about imaginary sanctions. They would get the benefits of unifying the country, without the costs. Just blame any shortage on sanctions.
This is exactly what is happening in Cuba, as far as I could observe.
A lot is blamed on US-led sanctions, while in reality the US is Cuba's largest trading partner, especially for daily needs. A lot of food is imported from the US, for example chicken: Without those imports, there would have been no meat available in many restaurants, especially the state-owned ones, while I was there at the beginning of this year.
Most of goods under sanction from the US are those, that Cuba would be hard-pressed to afford anyway: (High-)Tech.
What they do need, they get from mostly China or France. You can see some large construction sites in Havanna for high-end hotels being built with the most modern equipment from Europe (amidst the rubble and the standstill of the 50s era infrastructure).
Russia is running so low on modern weapons that they're bringing 50 year old planes and missiles out of storage. They've basically completely run out of cruise missiles, and due to sanctions don't have the ability to produce more, as modern designs rely on western chips. See https://medium.com/@x_TomCooper_x/supplement-of-backfires-and-kitchens-ef0088f33722 who I've generally found to be more accurate and less excitable than most commentators on the war.
They also were observed using anti-ship missiles to strike land targets what may be incompetence or triggered by running out of more fitting missiles (or misclassification of missiles by the commenting person)
Those missiles have always had a secondary land-attack capability, less accurate than Kalibr or Tomahawk but still useful against soft targets. And since Ukraine doesn't have a navy to speak of, it's not incompetence to use dual-mode naval missiles against land targets.
It does as you note suggest that they are not lavishly supplied with more modern and accurate weapons. "Running out" is probably an overstatement, because they've almost certainly got a substantial reserve stockpile labeled "for use against Real NATO only". But, less capable of damaging Ukraine's Western cities going forward.
@Scott I'm replying directly to you in the hopes that you see this message quickly. The author of this review has revealed his identity by linking to a review he wrote. I suggest removing that link (search for "I've reviewed").
Oh, that explains a lot, thanks for posting this. For Twitter haters I copied part of it (is it published somewhere in a sane format):
account Noah Smith:
(...)
> Hanania argues that an insurgency in Eastern Ukraine would be impossible because it's steppe; there's nowhere for rebels to hide.
> But where did the insurgents in Iraq and Syria hide? Western Iraq and Eastern Syria are completely open and flat.
> The insurgents hid in cities, towns, and villages.
(...)
> Finally, Hanania says that Ukrainians aren't willing to fight for American liberal ideals -- but then demolishes his own point when he notes that what they're actually fighting for is nationalism!
(...)
> His post is all about America -- what America wants, American values, and blah blah blah. His analysis of Ukraine's fighting spirit and ability is based entirely on a brief glance at its geography and population statistics, not at its recent history or politics or anything.
> As for me, I don't actually know how a Russian invasion of Ukraine would go, or how successful or sustained a Ukrainian insurgency might be; but I do know I wouldn't form a thesis about it on grounds as shaky as this.
> But Hanania doesn't care about Ukraine at all, he's just trying to own the libs in the American culture wars. So of course Americans who agree with him about those culture wars lap this stuff up, because they, too, want reasons to think the American libs suck.
Midde ground: imho sanctions almost never suceed in causing regime change (I do not know enough about South Africa to conclude whether it was an exception), but they can be effective in forcing regimes to change their policy. Like Iran scaling down its nuclear program, or Russia partially backing off its previous invasion of Ukraine in 2014
And they can be particularly effective at crippling the _power_ of an enemy. Regime change in Russia because of sanctions is unlikely - hurting the capacity to wage war is a certainty.
> Ukraine is a public choice failure because . . . the American people really support Ukraine, and the government acted on this?
I believe the point is to compare PCT to RCT. From RCT perspective, the steps America is doing in foreign policy makes no sense. This is considered bad, because if the steps are irrational, they might cause harm to US people (e.g. by spending taxpayers money needlessly). Although the government is doing what people want in Ukraine, (1) this choice might be easily manipulated by various stakeholders (see Section 2), and thus (2) this choice might not be rational for America.
Great example from Ukraine are gas/oil sanctions. The talks about these sanctions have increased the prices of these commodities so much that Russia currently has the highest profits ever. This is exactly the opposite of what a rational actor would want to happen to Russia. Yet the public-facing decisions around the sanctions made it possible.
But this argument effectively assumes that public either supports policy that is in its self-interest, or is manipulated.
An option that public supports idealistic policy even it will cost them out of genuine idealism is thus ruled out by definition. Since genuine idealism of course exists among people, it seems like implausible prior.
Supposedly prisoners even have a saying about this- 'prison preserves you'. You're forced to lead a fairly regimented life with little drugs or alcohol- yes they do smuggle some in, but vastly less than what someone could realistically get on the street. Exercise is famously popular with prisoners. I'm sure the food isn't great, but you are at least served 3 meals a day.
Imagine what would happen if they forced everyone to achieve a GED before they left
You're making a slightly different argument then mine but I think it's a fundamental criticism. The argument has presented seems "not even wrong" because the author is so vague about what term means and exactly what his thesis is supposedly contrasting against. It seems like a bit of a mishmash of things. Like he has something he thinkg he is trying to say but doesn't know how to articulate or think about it clearly in a way where he can express it coherently.
For myself, I was tepidly in support of the Iraq war Back in the Day because Amnesty International convinced me that sanctions were killing far more Iraqis than could plausibly be killed in an invasion of Iraq.
Are there any reliable poll showing that the "he American people really support Ukraine"? I'm asking because European media & politicians are 1000% behind arming the Ukraine, but we do have opinion survey data showing that most people are not https://ecfr.eu/publication/peace-versus-justice-the-coming-european-split-over-the-war-in-ukraine/. I wonder if there's similarly reliable, granular data about the US (going beyond trick questions like "do you support Ukraine's independence or are you just a despicable human being")
The article is about a decline in support, but even after the decline people who think we aren't doing enough easily outnumber those who think we're doing too much.
My understanding was that the point of sanctions wasn't to cause regime change, but to hobble a regime's offensive power - which, arguably, they have done quite well against Russia. If true, then this would be good reason to end the sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela - neither of those seem like they're going to be launching major invasions of their neighbors - and keep or expand them against Russia, which demonstrably *is*.
An alternative theory that I find more convincing is from "Special Providence" that argues for thinking about US Foreign Policy as having 4 competing goals (promoting American Capitalism, promoting values, security at home, minimal cost). Presidents have some flexibility in foreign policy but they are still subject to voters and and so are usually seeking a short term balance between those objectives, ignoring long term tradeoffs.
"the fall of the Soviet Union has not seen any withdrawal as promised to Gorbachev"
This is heavily disputed and there is no evidence that it's true:
1. Gorbachev later repeatedly denied that NATO had made any promises about expansion. He's said contradictory things on the subject, including "The topic of 'NATO expansion' was never discussed; it was not raised in those years. I am saying this with a full sense of responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country brought up the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact had ceased to exist in 1991," he told the newspaper Kommersant in October 2014.
2. Countries mostly don't do major policy stances via secret backroom wink-wink deals with each other. They generally sign treaties, and even if it doesn't rise to that level they at least make a public statement? A he said-she said story that NATO off the record agreed not to expand seems unlikely
The US 'refus[ed] to take NATO membership for Ukraine off the table'
NATO expansion requires the unanimous agreement of all NATO countries, which was never going to happen with Ukraine (as we're seeing now with Sweden and Finland). So this is a (probably bad faith) red herring that gets repeated a lot
Promises were made to the leader of the USSR. Not to the Russian Federation, and nothing binding future western leader to make them refuse to admit new members. James Baker never said the US under George Bush's son wouldn't let the Baltics join NATO, over 10 years later when the USSR ceased to exist at the its successor state would run by a little known KGB official stationed east Germany. Invading a state over verbal agreements made before your own troops were even born is a sorry excuse for a casus belli.
Also German chancellor Shultz literally said he would veto Ukrainian membership in February, and Zelenskyy (who won election based on putting Ukraine on good terms with Russia) even said Ukraine wouldn't insisted on NATO membership in March. Either Putin doesn't care about NATO membership or doesn't think Germany and Ukraine aren't in a position to make such promises, no doubt due to some sense of chauvinism; imagine basing national security on the promises of a US crypto-colony ( to used a common Russian nationalistic phrase) or a fake nation that should really be part of Russia.
Peter Ziehan's geographic-centric argument is better. Russia was going to attempt to seize Ukraine, because rulers of Russia have done so for centuries due to the lack of defensible geography to the west of Moscow, necessitating the need to assert hegemony as far as possible or until you hit geographically defensible point (the Carpathian mountains). Putin is no different from Catherine the Great or Lenin. Russia's demographic time bomb meant this was Putin's last chance.
Disputed nonbinding, nonpublic promises supposedly made to a previous state that fragmented into parts after it has failed have very different status to say
> if Johnson had turned around a year or two later and put missiles in Turkey anyway
which was made recently, to the same organization and had valid reasons to be not made public.
Grievances alone don't mean much. Not being able to subjugate eastern Europe is a grievance for Russian nationalists, should that be honoured at the expense of Estonia or Polish nationalists?
In any case, informal is the key word here. An informal arrangements/understanding with individual leaders are agreements made to leaders not institutions themselves. Successive leaders have no obligation to retain informal arrangements made by their predecessors, especially as time marches on.
Documents disclosed after the cold war showed that these "promises", made to Yeltsin were often just assurances that western leaders at the time were not interested in NATO expansion. Different western leaders emerged who were.
Modernity is run on the basis of formal documents made with or between bureaucratic institutions, between people perpetuated to successors on the basis of vague assumptions. Something the west would have thought people who grew in a modernity obsessed USSR, would have known.
2+4 occurred before the end of USSR and the Warsaw pact so, when it was ludicrous to even contemplate the possibility of Poland joining NATO never mind Estonia.
I'm saying informal agreements are not a sustainable way of conduct IR, especially in the modern world. If the Kremlin believed that informal agreements were enough to prevent its former colonies joining NATO, in the long term, after numerous changes in western and soviet leaders it is their fault. They should have sought formal and clear terms, with a specific time period.
To be clear, you are saying that the "promises" meant they NATO could not let Czechia or Latvia join indefinitely? Would the Russian Federation have a legitimate grievance if Czechia joined NATO in 2100 or 5 billion years from now before the sun explodes moments before the sun explodes?
Russian Federation has also made plenty of promises, including to (as a member of the UN and signature to its charter) seek to settle international disputes by other means than warfare and in general, not wage war unless approved to do so by UNSC. Despite these holy signed treaties, most of its neighbors maintain some military forces and practice against repelling a Russian invasion, because they are not stupid.
Part of diplomacy is not to be stupid, and understand when the states make serious promises and when they do not and the parameters they are contingent on. For example, talks relating to German unification in 1990 were made with assumption on the both sides that the USSR would remain as a power to be reckoned with. To everyone's surprise, it kept imploding in 1991 and in even more spectacular fashion than previously.
Binding treaties like ABM treaty could still be withdrawn from; having "no NATO expansion" in proper treaty format would ultimately make no difference as deterrent that made it impossible to think about was removed.
Treaties are generally preferred over unofficial verbal agreements for a number of reasons. For one their is a clearer understanding of what parties have signed up for, breaking said agreements are well publicised and they aren't dependent on certain people being in power.
What decision to expand NATO into former Warsaw Pact/Baltics (and then Ukraine/Georgia) entailed was well-understood at the time (at least enough that people can point out to 1990s articles being "prophetic" today). Including Russians potentially never living that down.
It was the same assessment under Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin. Those that considered risk of escalation acceptable or ignorable enough to proceed (even after 2008 and 2014) won.
Czechia, Poland, and the Baltics joined despite the Russian federation making some fuss with nothing coming it. After all why would Putin want to get into a spat with NATO whilst making money hand over fist selling oil and gas western Europe, and sheltering the profits in the London property market? Many NATO nations were more than willing to act as his appeasers.
This view also ignores why ex-Warsaw pact states wanted to join NATO/ align themselves with the west. The decisions made by the Kremlin have systematically pushed eastern Europe into NATOs arms. Putin's invasion of Georgia, convinced Poland to let the US put missile defence systems in their land. Putin telling Yanukovych to back out of an EU trade and annexing Crimea in 2014 and war in the Donbas crushed pro-Russian sentiment in Ukraine and brought it closer into US alignment and made NATO membership more popular. Now Putin's invasion Ukraine has made Poland express an interest in stationing US nukes, and got Finland and Sweden applying for NATO membership.
Much like how the blowback of the war on terror produced more and more terrorists, the Kremlin has been the biggest force pushing eastern Europe into the west's arms.
When your "concerns" are the fundamental sovereignty of other countries and the rules of an international body you are not part of, then its entirely reasonable not to engage with you seriously as there is no prospect for change
Putin claims that the U.S. made Russia a promise not to expand NATO and then expanded NATO. Now he demands that the U.S. make the same promise again! If I believed him, I'd think he was pretty dumb.
This is an odd book. I have repeatedly argued that realist analysis of foreign policy is the beginning of the discussion not the end, and that foreign policy is always heavily driven by domestic political constraints. "If you fuck up the foreign politics, something bad might happen, like losing a war. but if you fuck up the domestic, something absolutely disastrous happens, you lose an election! And if that happens, it doesn't matter how genius your foreign policy is, you don't get to make it because you're no longer in charge."
that said, a lot of the arguments it seems to be making are bad. the principal driver of american adventurism abroad is not lockheed martin lobbyists. they don't care what the planes are for as long as they're bought and, if anything, they prefer not to have the boat rocked. the main driver is the american people's messianic vision of the world and our conviction that we know the true path for the good life. Americans get the moralistic foreign policy they ask for, good and hard, and the idea that you can change that by tweaking FARA is... frankly laughable.
yes, but nothing is more annoying than someone arguing your case badly. Defense contractors don't push wars, wars are disruptive. Oshkosh is a major defense contractor now because the iraq war created huge demand for MRAPS and entered into a field that general dynamics would have much prefered they stay out of.
An increasing defense budget is good, all other things being equal.
An increase in their share of the defense budget is good, all other things being equal.
A sudden change to the needs of the military is bad, all other things being equal, since it introduces real competition that could cause a competitor to overtake them.
This neatly explains why the defense industry funds hawkish think-tanks. Hawkish think-tanks protect the same of the defense budget from dovish think-tanks who keep prattling on about "spending America's peace dividend" on <insert cause here>
Any military material spending by US (be that war or "sending weapons to Ukraine") also means new orders to defence contractors to "replenish the stock" (and potentially more international orders if weapons performed well).
Libya for example expended large part of NATO missile inventory that had to be rebuilt over many years.
why would they? they don't ask that question about any other sort of government spending, most of which grows a lot faster than military spending does.
I can see there are interesting anecdotes in this book, but I don't see a useful theory. The review's claims for the theory are either too vague to be useful, or are easily disproven.
For example, if Ukraine and Taiwan policy were heavily influenced by weapons manufacturers, we'd see a strong bias toward sending those countries the biggest-ticket equipment we can. Yet Obama and Biden have held back from sending expensive Patriot missiles or modern jets to Ukraine, and the USA has started turning down Taiwan's requests for big flashy tanks and jets in favor of more practical anti-invasion equipment.
Now, maybe the book is more reasonable than the review. But if there's a testable statistical prediction the book makes about weapons manufacturers' impact on foreign policy, this review doesn't tell me. "Sometimes you'll see a bias toward weapons sales" is probably true, and fine as anecdotes. But it's not solid enough to make predictions with.
Same for the author's quotes about Russia invading Ukraine. If the west's distinctive provocation was restricted to NATO, why did Russia also invade Ukraine in 2014? But if the western stupidity is that Russia had a more general pseudo-imperial authority over Ukraine, why does the review complain so much about America's own pseudo-imperial behavior?
Again, I expect the book is more coherent than the review. But it doesn't speak well of the book's theory that the reviewer isn't able to be consistent in handling Ukraine with that theory.
A book of complaints about American foreign policy lies and errors is useful, the same as a doctor taking a detailed history of a particular patient is useful. But it's not the same as a meaningfully predictive theory of how countries in general make their foreign policy.
I'm looking forward to such a theory, better than "realism" or "grand strategy", and the book that gives it to me. I don't think it's this one.
The reviewer talks about the theory as deserving to seriously displace existing concepts like realism and grand strategy. That's great! I'm not super fond of either existing model.
I just don't see what this theory predicts more reliably than those two, that's big enough to care about. Where are the new theory predictions that are both significant and falsifiable?
"Foreign policy is affected by what's popular with voters and special interests; Ukraine's popularity isn't coincidental to the war" is a significant claim. But the claim is so vague that it isn't falsifiable enough to use for predictions.
"Weapons manufacturers will lobby to sell weapons, and changes in lobbying can explain 5% of changes in American military aid to countries" would be falsifiable. But that's not really significant on the scale of displacing "realism" or "grand strategy."
What claims do you read the theory as making that are both significant and falsifiable?
Or we could read the review as not making major claims for the theory - but then the theory wouldn't be very useful.
Hm. I guess my take is that I know what "realism" and "grand strategy" tell me to expect in wars, that I couldn't expect from formal agreements or intuitions of honor/morality alone.
By comparison, this "public choice theory" doesn't seem to be as specific in its predictions, except "governments avoid foreign policy moves that will be broadly condemned by their voters or interest groups." That seems true, but not impressive.
Is there a public-choice insight for foreign policy that you've been getting off this review, or the author's work, that you personally find impressive or interesting?
"Base venality" - if that means "fighting starts where there's money to be made, and not if there's not," that doesn't seem to accord with American intervening in impoverished Somalia or Kosovo, nor with America _not_ sending troops to the resource-rich Congo during its terrible war or to oil-rich nearby Venezuela.
Or if "venality" means "in any war, there will be people looking to bend policy in ways that boost their paycheck," that's surely true. But it doesn't distinguish war from any other government crisis responsibility.
Likewise, if "widespread ignorance" means that war policy involves a frightening degree of trust in not-so-expert designated "experts," that's again surely true but also true of pandemic policy (CDC and FDA failures), or central bank policy in 2008-2010, or any famous nuclear reactor accident.
"War, like any crisis, is full of underexamined slogans, hucksters hoping to sell their cause or product, and shameless blunders by alleged experts": a good caution for idealists, more than a big insight.
You seem to have noticed something beyond that, though.
Is there something distinctive to war that you think this book correctly tells us to watch out for?
> predictions that are both significant and falsifiable? [Of Public Choice vs realpolitik/unitary state theory]
Significant but perhaps not falsifiable:-
1. The USA will conduct reactive military adventurist operations in preference to strengthening multilateral international organisations to preserve world order (which latter approach is less costly to the state as a whole).
2. The USA's foreign policy will be volatile, changing in reaction to events elsewhere and especially in reaction to major domestic events. (There is no persistent unitary state consistently pursuing its interests.)
3. The USA's foreign policy discourse will be framed in military terms rather than policing and rehabilitation terms ("enemy" rather than "lawbreaker"). There must be at least one "enemy" made to seem a real and present danger. (For a while the big bads were Iran and/or North Korea, which would be ridiculous if it weren't so pathetic.)
OK, that's off the top of my head. With a week or two's thought I might come up with tests. Not going to get that, though.
It seems like a natural extension of PCT, no? Also, the claim that arms manufacturers don't have any interest in how their weapons are used is weak. There are obviously second order consequences here that will affect their bottom line.
I'm not sure how much of a problem this poses for the book on a theoretical level, but I was just struck by this phrase in the review:
"The West cannot rely on sanctions to make Russia abandon its core national security interests, which at the very least include..."
But if public choice theory defines how the USA's foreign policy decisions are made, it presumably defines how Russia carries out its foreign policy, too.
And I know the book doesn't include Ukraine, so this must be the reviewer's own thought:
"Western response [to the Ukraine war] is driven by extreme public outcry to an unprecedented extent"
I think "public outcry" is just another way of reifying some kind of national interest, isn't it? I don't think you can include "the public" in a public choice analysis.
But overall I like the review and the idea. Hanania's argument is like a fully-evolved species of "never ascribe to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence," which makes a lot of sense.
They're not competent at foreign policy, is the point. Hanania seems to me to be arguing that countries are not competent at foreign policy because there simply are no institutions that properly coordinate their efforts. Hence when countries do very horrible foreign policy, like starting wars, it's not because the country is horrible; it's because it's incompetent.
I'd argue the west can rely on sanctions to make Russia (or rather Putin and his inner circle of state sec elites) "abandon its core national security interests", by making it unable to successfully wage war.
What makes you think the Kaiser could have been invaded if he had access to Canadian wheat or Hitler had access to US oil?
Also with regards to the current war, Russia is heavily dependent on western imports of components parts and capital goods. Without those it is only a matter of time before it can no longer wage large scale modern war of territorial conquest.
> But if public choice theory defines how the USA's foreign policy decisions are made, it presumably defines how Russia carries out its foreign policy, too.
Public choice theory only applies to democracies or states with diverse political interest groups. Centralized states where power is concentrated into individuals (or groups/institutions) who primarily or exclusively care about their state's long-term security and power, will presumably tend to act closer to a unitary actor model.
I think this misunderstands a bit how "centralized states" work; and how public choice is functioning in this example.
The classic way of looking at public choice is looking at who gets paid, with explicit flows of money through the state to certain state actors. But in these foreign policy cases, it doesn't seem to be much like that. In the case of Bush and Iraq, for example, Bush seems to have been committed to invading Iraq; but so far as I know, he didn't make any money off it. I assume he got paid in buddy-buddy-ideology coins at cocktail parties. (This might mean that we really need to use a different theory instead of public choice. I take Hanania's most important point to be just this: stop analysing foreign policy at the level of the state, that's the wrong level. Public choice was a decent theory to hang this argument on, even if it's later superseded by more advanced non-state-level theories.)
In the case of more autocratic countries, I don't think they have anything like the kind of unity or consistency that you seemed to be suggesting. They too have their ideologies and factions. The lack of rule of law means that clear, well-documented flows of money to licenced lobbyists don't really appear, which stymies traditional PCT analysis, but they're still full of different groups competing over financial, physical, and reputational resources.
An example would be China: the whole world is thinking about whether China will launch a military action against Taiwan, and most commentators seem to think it basically hinges on the relative balance of power between a bunch of hawkish military types and the rest of the establishment. If factional jockeying gives the military types the upper hand at any moment, it could all kick off. This sounds to me exactly like what Hanania is getting at: maybe not classic PCT, but everyone agrees that the right level to be looking at when you're trying to understand this particular military (in)action is not the level of the state, but the interplay of factions within it.
> An example would be China: the whole world is thinking about whether China will launch a military action against Taiwan, and most commentators seem to think it basically hinges on the relative balance of power between a bunch of hawkish military types and the rest of the establishment.
This is the exact opposite of what's going on in public choice theory! The hawks and the rest of the establishment *all care* about whether they invade Taiwan or not. In America, only a small group of people care about American sanctions on Cuba, and they all care in one direction, so even though the policy is clearly very stupid and ineffective, it continues.
I suppose there may be some Chinese guys who really care a lot about, say, Botswana, and therefore exercise much more influence in the Party on the subject of Botswana because nobody else cares. But given the country's relative weakness compared to the USA, these kinds of parochial decision-making processes will probably amount to "and China today signed a historical trade agreement with Botswana" or "and China today decided to stop exporting goods to Botswana because they said the word 'Republic of Taiwan'." (Which actually does call to mind the recent matters with Lithuania and Taiwan. Perhaps some faction of the CCP really cares about the slight, and the rest doesn't care about Lithuania, as it's an irrelevant country to the PRC, so you get the extreme response.)
I'm not certain that I understand what you're saying there. I disagree with some of it - I don't think all or most of the establishment really cares about Taiwan.
That balance I was talking about would be something akin to the balance between the "invade Iraq" clique in the US government and the rest of the establishment, who generally didn't care much about Iraq, but think war in general is a bad thing.
In China, it's a similar balance around a different balance point. Everyone seems to agree that Taiwan is a part of China (in some mysterious metaphysical way) - that's the baseline, and doesn't seem to imply much in the way of action. Some hardliners want to invade Taiwan; the rest of the establishment thinks war in general is a bad thing.
I dunno, though! I'm not hugely well-informed on this, and am only offering a best guess.
Fortunately we are not total idiots and this time it is not a sole solution and we are also - for example - supplying (some, not enough) weapons to Ukraine to protect our core national security interests.
Russia losing or at least being ground down in Ukraine substantially reduces risks of Russia invading NATO member which would require:
- starting direct war USA vs Russia with high risk of escalation to nuclear war or USA losing it
- effectively dismantling NATO which would discredit USA foreign policy and alliances
both would be catastrophic for USA.
(yes, Russia invading NATO member would be monumentally stupid and idiotic and unprecedented and not worth it - the same things were supposed to ensure that Russia will not fully invade Ukraine)
Or to be more exact, it would be fully take over by Russia which would noticeably increase Russian power (yes, their equipment is mostly outdated and country poor, stll it would boost Russia).
Such nonresponse would also very likely increase risk of Putin taking extremely dumb risks like invading Estonia.
In short, I worry that it would be equivalent to what was done with Czechoslovakia before WW II.
And Russian occupation of Ukraine would be likely pretty bad.
> Also could have done a lot to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine after war broke out
That would have greater chance if Russian demands would not be utterly insane and clearly only token ones as they really wanted their war.
> Clearly, our strategy in Ukraine is making a Russia-NATO war much more likely than it would be in a vacuum.
What would be alternative? Surrender Ukraine to Russia, ignore all problems and hope that Putin will not continue?
Do you seriously believe that the end result is still likely to be the same as it would have been if Ukraine capitulated ~immediately? That seems very doubtful to me- Russia's initial objectives pretty clearly included regime change and replacement with a pro-Russian government, which no longer seems at all likely.
Obviously Putin thought America ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine was so the most important thing. If his sovereign and colony speech tell us anything is that he doesn't believes those two states are anything other than US puppets, especially with Ukraine. Whether the "Little Russians" do something counter to the interest of the "Great Russians", especially assert nationalism, that is product of meddlesome outsiders; the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, the Habsburg empire, the Kulaks in conjunction with newly created Polish state, and now "drug addicted neo-Nazis" in alignment with the US.
The cause of this war is more likely to be Russian colonialist mentality. The Kremlin doesn't consider Ukrainians to be worth negotiating with. It's kind of an extreme version of how the UK is dealing with the Northern Irish protocol.
A rather insightful Russian commentator I follow would agree with you, and would in fact go further and state that one of Russia's most powerful military weapons is their ability to spin narratives. In his words:
"When a Russian is on TV and his lips are moving, he is carrying out a combat operation".
The NATO angle was picked because the Kremlin believed it was an ideal fracture point to use to try and prevent support for Ukraine from solidifying, and it has been partially successful.
Putin wanted a guarantee that Ukraine would *never* join NATO, which NATO was not willing to give, and in fact explicitly ruled out. Sholtz may have opposed Ukraine's accession to NATO, but Sholtz will not be German Chancellor forever. Russia wanted a guarantee it could rely on even if the situation changed in a way that reduced its leverage over NATO's decisions.
This comment strikes me as an example of the modern western bias to look at things in a very short time span. The amount of times I hear people in the news describe something as "unprecedented" when precedents are easily found (often even within living memory, but back 50,60 years.) Alarms me.
Merkel was only Chancellor for what, 2, 3 decades? That's a short time in history.
Similarly, some people say things like "The damage to Russia's econmy outweighs any benefit they get from conquering Ukraine." and that might be true for 2 or 3 decades, but eventually, the extra population, tax income and land will even it out and turn it into a profitable decision.
The "Last ten years is all of history" seems to be the "Standards of politics" and that really needs to change.
Not a substantive comment but if this is supposed to be anonymous, there appears to be a link to one of the author’s other reviews in section 7 that should probably be removed till identities are revealed.
> We know what the Russians want. They have made clear, openly and consistently, that they do not want NATO to keep expanding.
There are two claims here. The first claim is that the Russians want this specific thing (as opposed to, say, annexing territory). The second claim is that "we" (the US? the blogosphere? the rationalists?) are in broad agreement that this is true.
Both of these claims seem pretty false to me and I was surprised to see them asserted without evidence.
In particular I'm having a hard time understanding the Russian objection to NATO expanding. If the whole point of NATO is preventing Russia from conquering Europe, then it's hard to hear "we don't like NATO" as anything other than "we don't like things that prevent us from conquering Europe".
NATO has been involved in foreign interventions, e.g. Yugoslavia, which were not purely defensive, and has always been perceived by the Soviet and Russian elite as representing a security threat basically forever. The Warsaw Pact (also a collective defense agreement) was formed in response to NATO expansion.
It is, realistically, unlikely that a NATO that expanded to include every country bordering Russia would just invade Russia. But it is equally unrealistic that a Warsaw Pact that expanded to include Canada, Mexico, and Cuba would just invade the USA, yet it would be ridiculous to say the only reason that the USA might be concerned about such a thing is its own desire to invade Canada, Mexico, and Cuba.
(I think both that Russia does not want NATO to keep expanding, but also the current war is not really about NATO expansion, as Ukraine was at no risk of joining NATO any time soon.)
> The Warsaw Pact (also a collective defense agreement)
Nope, that was tool of imperialistic Russian policy. Note who was invaded by that Russian organization: countries belonging to it that tried to stop being controlled by USSR.
> The multi-national Communist armed forces' sole joint action was the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.
I was also repeatedly used as threat in Poland by regime as explanation why they are oppressing people (otherwise Soviets will fully invade and things will be even worse), presumably also in other countries.
Say what you want about NATO, but at least it has not jointly invaded one of its members for defying USA.
NATO isn't a defensive organization either, if you define "collective defense" solely counting if it's actually triggered. NATO has never defended a member state. Glancing at Wikipedia, it has been involved in: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Gulf of Aden, and Libya, none of which were attacking NATO members (maybe you could generously count Afghanistan, though of course as this very article notes, 9/11 was done by non-state actors who the Taliban were perfectly willing to sacrifice).
I mean, really. Do you think that if West German troops had invaded East Germany, the Warsaw Pact *wouldn't* have moved to defend them?
I have no problem with admitting that describing NATO as "purely defensive" would be lying/untrue/misleading.
But Russian organization went further: its sole action was invasion of own member. It is not merely doing things in addition to being defensive pact: it was aggressor to member of own defensive pact.
A) The primary function of collective defense organizations is preventing there from being a war in the first place, so when they work, nobody notices them doing anything; and
B) No matter how evil the Warsaw Pact was to its member states, that is not why the USA would not like to be surrounded by Warsaw Pact states (or why Russia does not want to be surrounded by NATO states), so this kvetching feels pointless.
Putin had said among other things that he sees NATO activity in Ukraine pre-dating invasion as basically NATO expansion without formal membership. "They just renamed NATO bases into 'NATO missions'".
Ukraine taking all the risks with none of the benefits.
Firstly, kudos on setting an ambitious goal; reviewing a non-popsci textbook on a known-to-be-Gordian mess of complex nuance is inherently pretty difficult. I feel like you did a fair job of translating an incredibly dry and niche book into a moderately high-ABV% distilled review. Not the easiest grapes to make wine from.
That being said...wow, a whole barrage of [definitional citation links] and (parenthetical explanations) in the introduction, followed by mostly a dearth of same in the main body, and then proliferating once more in the conclusion. I'm sympathetic, understanding academia frequently requires a certain amount of background comprehension. But I'm not gonna read 7 other Nature Valley(tm) granola bar-esque Wikipedia articles (dense and dry, huge mess of supporting citation crumbs) as preparation for better understanding a mere book review on a blog, sorry. This feels like a case where adding a bit of extra length to expound on tl;dr foundational concepts would help a lot; several other reviews did this. (And yes, I concede this failing to Do The Homework possibly invalidates most of my criticisms.)
Along that same line, I'd have liked to see more citations or direct book quotes in the main body. (Hard to tell from formatting which parts you're referencing from book itself; the fusion review did the same thing.) There's a certain narrative being told, and it sounds plausible enough...but is it true? I don't know, and am not sure how to judge the evidence. You do candidly admit IR is a super-subjective and hard to empiricize field, which is appreciated. At the same time, "it’s difficult to know who possesses genuine expertise" applies here! What particular cause do I have to trust the experts cited for the PCT model over IR normies? And are they right by coincidence, e.g. past IR data can be massaged to fit the PCT regression line better than the UA one, even if the underlying "math" doesn't hold up? My priors against orthodox social science narratives are fairly high, yet reversed bad science is not good science. I'm updating in the direction of "UA lacks explanatory power", at minimum; skeptical of much more.
Conversely, the section on sanctions did seem fairly compelling. I'm not old enough to have followed many of the less recent examples, but with Middle East, Venezuela, and Russian sanctions there's definitely been this weirdly optimistic vibe of "they'll call uncle any day now, surely the economy will motivate rational self-interest!" Which clearly hasn't panned out, and at least in the immediate conflict, feeling inflation's bite domestically really drives home the immediate collatoral damage of sanctions. Convincing arguments for sanctions not even being applied in a plausibly deterrent way, too, so even if they "worked" we'd never know it. Given the disputed-at-best track record, further waiting for Any Day Now seems self-flagellatory, if not outright perverse. Better carrotsticks are needed. (I notice that this is the only section full of empirical quantification, which is maybe why I'm more persuaded.)
Finally, the blue and yellow elephant in the room:
>and conquest has disappeared from international society i.e. selection pressure does not exist.
Immediately upon reading that line, I was like "uh, yeah, about that..." It would have been a huge oversight not to include the later section on Ukraine, so I'm very glad you did. This also easily makes the case for Book Is Relevant, of course, so on that grounds alone it's a key section. I have a couple quibbles though.
Firstly, with all due respect to Mr. Hanania (thanks for commenting, by the way! this isn't personal!), I was under the impression that his reputation among the Ratsphere had taken a bit of a swan dive recently, specifically in regards to Ukraine war writings (and possibly covid?). He's not a writer I've perused much, so I didn't have any particular priors; but seeing a lot of other community members whom I respect say that Hanania Used To Be Great, But Now #smh, I did revise downwards some. Unclear how book should be interpreted in this regard. OTOH, the endorsements by Lord Byren Caplan, TC, etc. are encouraging. Mixed Bag here.
Secondly, I notice that Hanania's suggested ideas for norm changes are:
1. Fix the press
2. Fix the press
3. Fix the press
4. Fix the press
...but this doesn't seem to follow from earlier. Didn't I just read that "the cost of educating oneself about foreign policy outweighs any benefit an[sic] one can expect to gain as individual citizens cannot affect foreign policy", plus collective action problem; and "the public is ignorant of foreign affairs, so those who control the flow of information have excess influence"? Maybe I'm missing the causal chain, but I'm unclear on how improved media reporting which the public won't read anyway will improve things. There's no guarantee that the media itself won't become one of those controllers of IR information flow with excess influence. (In fact, many would say it already does that, in very-not-neutral ways. MSM Delenda Est.) At minimum this would require Mambo Policy Change #5 to be feasible; given the hysterical establishment reactions to Snowden, Manning, Assange, etc. I am left less than hopeful.
Furthermore, it seems contradicted by the later musings on the hyperreal powers of Twitter outrage. That section seems to invite the argument that:
1. By PCT, politics is the ultimate driver of foreign policy.
2. Politics is downstream of culture.
3. Therefore, culture is the ultimate driver of foreign policy.
Now, I suppose one could very charitably classify Twitter under the umbrella of "the press". But that seems like a reach, and anyway, who's going to reform Twitter in support of better IR, Elon Musk? Do we even want to "feed the beast" and further entrench Twitter's hegemony on modern discourse? Pretty sure an entire other book review recently made the case that this is a Really Bad Idea. I'm left confused whether the befuddled public is powerless to affect IR, or a super-engaged Awareness Raised public actually controls the IR levers after all.
However, I do agree Ukraine Twitter seems to follow the Bad Thing Happened -> We Must Do Something -> This Is Something failure mode, with attendant policy disasters. In this sense, it's indeed supportive of the PCT-IR model. Now one just needs to go back to all the pre-Twitter wars and demonstrate the same pattern, and I'm totally sold on that hypothesis.
Overall, intriguing but kinda frustrating. Share other commentors' hope that the book itself fills in many of these potholes. One hardly needs to make the case that American IR is in dire need of a higher sanity waterline. Not just for the greater good of the rest of the world, but because such unequivocally shameful blunders are a huge part of why the left has given up on patriotism, to their electoral detriment: https://www.slowboring.com/p/hungarian-nationalism-is-not-the . Like charity, self-esteem begins at home, and I'm tired of being ashamed of my nationality.
I don't understand how typos like this happen. (I don't mean to pick on this author; I see them elsewhere as well.) When I type on my computer, in almost every context, misspellings get a red underline. It doesn't catch every mistake (e.g., using the wrong word), but it catches things like Librya that aren't words at all.
Well, it looks like this person plagiarized parts of this essay (in at least one case; more unconfirmed). Could be a spelling mistake lifted from a more informal text.
There is another purpose of sanctions that I have not seen mentioned here:
Countries with smaller economies are less effective at waging war. Destroying a country's economy makes it less capable of sustaining the wars it is currently fighting and less capable of winning wars in the future.
This is especially relevant to the current sanctions against Russia. The sanctions on Russian (oil & gas) exports have been weak, so Russia still has cash. But the sanctions on Russian imports have been much stronger. Russia has a large military industrial complex and is a major weapons producer and exporter, but its supply chains are very entangled with Europe. When Europe & the US restrict Russian imports, including threatening third party importers with sanctions, Russia's industry doesn't have the parts to produce lots of things ... including tanks. [1] Maybe Russia will learn to make these parts themselves, but Russia doesn't seem to have enough expertise in some fields, especially electronics. If Russia can't produce new tanks to replace the ones destroyed in battle, it will have a harder time maintaining the war.
And for obvious reasons neither NATO nor EU nor Estonia wants to risk nuclear war over Russian invasion in Estonia, so best way to solve this is to make Russians unable to invade.
(even better would be having Russia making credible commitment to not invading but it is not possible right now)
It seems a caricature of mainstream International Relations theory to say its dependent on the unitary actor model, since even the very introductory stuff I've done presents it as some model among many and warns that it's a simplification
Seems to be a general thing in these kind of books where you set up a opposing position of an uncritical majority you can valiantly push back on
I fully agree. Hanania attacks a strawman here, and not even an interesting one.
Also, I am extremely reminded of Tetlock's concept of a hedgehog: Hanania seems to have a single model of foreign policy (that is determined by the interest group which profit most), and tries to explain everything with this world model.
The model is not completely false (but not new either!). Sometimes it's true and gives useful insights. But sometimes not. The problem is that Hanania tries to fit everything into this single model, and often it does not fit. The right thing would be to use this model along with five others, all of which are sometimes useful. But with this exclusionary perspective, the book is mediocre at best.
After reading some of Hanania's own work, I think the reviewer misses the author's real insight about foreign policy.
In Hanania's telling, the overwhelming flaw in foreign policy is inertia.
Geographic inertia: We tag particular countries or regions as "national interests," and then send troops or deploy sanctions obsessively to the same places sixty years later, while neglecting objectively more important parts of the world. We hate atrocities in Kosovo? Great! What about 100x bigger atrocities in the Congo? Oil is a key resource? Sure, but what about lithium? It's not that we have no excuses for our interests; it's that we hardly ever update them to changed reality.
Alliance inertia: we decided the Taliban was The 100% Enemy and the Kabul government The 100% Good Guys, and so tied our hands for twenty years against any new arrangements or any real leverage for peace, no matter how corrupt they became in Kabul or how negotiable some Taliban allegiances might be. In the same way we "picked our side" in Iraq and created a Sunni insurgency that didn't have to happen; in the same way we still throw away compromise deals that don't "defeat" Iran, even when they're hardly more bloodthirsty in the region these days than Saudi Arabia. Why? Because Iran is "our enemy" - by the sacred definition of forty years of inertia.
Failure inertia: since you can always pay strangers to keep suffering for you, nobody ever admits an intervention failed when they can just keep fighting and let the next President handle it. Politically, who could blame them? Biden got roasted for withdrawing from Afghanistan, even when everybody saw staying wasn't achieving anything permanent for all the billions spent. So sanctions, interventions, and worst of all civil wars get prolonged, at horrible cost in lives and money, because no politician wants the hit from negotiating a sensible but "disappointing" compromise or exit.
Toolkit inertia: if we've used sanctions in one place, why not use them everywhere? If we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, why not send some troops to Syria and Libya? By a sort of circular "it's the conventional answer" reasoning, whatever we've done before is what we try to do again, even if stopped being effective two or eight interventions ago.
Domestic policy also has inertia, of course. But when it's domestic policy, voters can see for themselves the policy you're sticking with is dumb, because it hits their own lives. In foreign policy the people who tell voters about the policy results are often from the same building as the ones who made that policy. So the mistakes can go on and on.
I'm not seeing a big-picture theory, in what I've read so far, to displace realism or grand strategy. But Hanania makes a great point about foreign policy's curse of inertia.
Great points. I'd add "bureaucratic inertia", where (e.g.) anti-soviet hawks hired and trained the newer anti-soviet hawks (who became the anti-russian hawks) who hired and trained the newer anti-russian hawks. Also "journalistic inertia" -- the lack of imagination we see in running tired or reboots of old childrens' movies isn't restricted to the writers in Hollywood. The writers everywhere seem stuck in ruts that make everyone we don't like into baby-killing genocidal dictators who gas their own people.
> It’s difficult to see what threat the US is protecting against in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany.
it is easy: it is Russia. For example USAF Boeing KC-135R Stratotanker flying right now above eastern Poland has flown from airbase near Cambridge in UK.
Boeing E-8C flying right now above Romania has flown from Ramstein air base in Germany.
Drone flying above Black Sea (FORTE10 series missions by US) is based in Sicily.
It is not secret or classified info - see https://www.flightradar24.com/ and top tracked planes and ones in eastern flank of NATO. It was also obvious when the book was written and review discusses 2022 invasion so author should not be allowed to selectively hide info.
Not sure is it strategic incompetence and pro-Russia propaganda or being simply ignorant.
Hopefully "Russia is a threat and likely to start wars of aggression that will murder thousands of people" is now going to be treated seriously, at least for few years? And not dismissed as Poles being russophobes?
Exact locations are case of status quo bias and could be relocated closer to Russia since USSR fall, but maybe their position remains optimal given increased range of both airplanes and various missiles?
> Ukraine has won the meme war with utterly lopsided propaganda and unanimous international support on the Internet.
Author is completely wrong again, and USA/Europe centric. Russian propaganda was very successful in China, and achieved better effects in South America and Africa.
Please do not treat this article too seriously.
I just looked through quickly at random points and spotted that.
Either way, this article appears to be of a low value and spending time on dismantling other claims is better spend elsewhere.
Though I am curious is it evidence of Richard Hanania having this problems, reviewer, or both.
Agreed on these points definitely. My initial response to 'it's difficult to see what threat...' was also... Seriously? The author cannot be looking very hard then
Couple of thoughts from a European who did this kind of thing for a living all his life, and has seen how the US system works at first hand.
First, it's trivially true that nations are not unitary actors for anything, and certainly not in foreign policy. For one thing foreign policy is complicated, and it requires a compromise between all sorts of factors; political, military, economic, social, and of course the views and powers of local actors, and the question of what is actually feasible. Shifting coalitions within and outside government will support different agendas, and the country or region concerned may even have some influence! Saudi Arabia is a good example of intermingled and conflicting agendas for all western nations, not least the US.
But the US system is so massive, so complex, so conflictual and so sealed off from wider reality as to constitute a special case. Every part of the US government effectively has its own foreign policy, and it is therefore possible to stop or disable almost any initiative. There is very little opportunity for central direction or control, and most policies are exhausting compromises which reflect the balance of power in Washington. The State Department, for example, is only one actor in foreign policy, and the whole of the rest of the world is just a lobby group, often of not much importance. Interest groups can sabotage even agreed policies: the Pentagon didn't want to be in Bosnia in the 90s, and was lobbying US politicians and the media to overturn the policies of their own government.
This means that it's always dangerous to assume that anything you agree with the US will actually be implemented. Nobody in Washington is really in charge of anything or, if you prefer, everyone thinks they are. Countries who thought they had negotiated treaties with the US are often stunned to discover that they are never implemented because Congress doesn't like them, or some part of the US government stops the necessary laws coming into force. This is why the Russians have always dismissed the US as "non-agreement-capable", and why they have finally decided that negotiation is pointless, and all that matters is power, and facts on the ground. Some interpret all this as the US deliberately creating crises and instability, but I actually think the explanation lies precisely in the anarchy of policy-making (if you can call it that) in Washington. The other important consequence, as I suggested above, is that the US is isolated from the consequences of its actions, and never suffers from mistakes. There is an assumption of foreign policy autarky: it's true that western governments specifically didn't envisage any enlargement of NATO in the early 1990s (I was there), but, hey, times change, and anyway what can the Russians do about it anyway? This is about to change with Ukraine.
But the biggest influence on foreign policy is inertia, as I suggested in this article of a couple of weeks ago.
Recent western policy over Ukraine, with its bluster, its pose of political and moral superiority and its open call, for years now, to replace the government of Russia with one more to its liking, is only explicable on the basis of a western economic, strategic and military power and superiority that no longer exist. But western ruling classes and their media and intellectual servants simply haven't adjusted to this new weakness. Sanctions were agreed on not because they were likely to be effective, but because they were what we always do, and anyway there was no choice. The West was unable to intervene militarily so sanctions, even self-defeating ones, even self-harming ones, were preferable to doing nothing. After all, something might turn up. In fact, as I argue in my most recent article, we are going to have to get used to the political and consequences of being a lot weaker.
Finally, it's wrong to neglect the ideological element, as theories of this sort tend to. Since the end of the Cold War, western states have been on a messianic drive to spread (neo)liberal ideas everywhere. The post-national, post-culture, post-language, post-history, post-identity, post-politics, neoliberal norms exemplified by the EU and the US have recently hit an obstruction, in the form of a powerful state where history, patriotism, language culture and history are still factors. That state must therefore be defeated so that neoliberal norms can triumph. I never thought I'd live to see this, but in Europe, certainly, the level of sheer blind hatred of the Russians among the PMC is terrible to behold. So no, foreign policy isn't made by defence manufacturers or lobby groups vying for power. Sometimes, it isn't rational at all.
I'm grateful to you for interesting insights into how foreign policy works (or doesn't) in Washington, but the second half of your post is, to put it mildly, unpersuasive. Disclaimer: I am a naturalized American citizen and a member of the PMC that supposedly hates the poor Russians so.
When you imply that the West hates Russia because it's a country with strong "history, patriotism, language, culture," that sounds like a mirror image of Bush saying of the Middle East, "They hate us for our FREEDOMS!" I have nothing against Russia's history, patriotism, language or culture - I mean, other than the fact that the Red Army invaded my native country during WWII and then the Soviets f****d my country over for 40+ years, but, eh, bygones! I think Russian language is beautiful and Russian culture has given the world some amazing jewels, like Dostoevsky and Rachmaninov.
I have absolutely nothing against the Russian people. I do hate Putin, not because he presides over a country with a strong history and language and whatnot, but because he is a murderous, vile scumbag who has caused horrific atrocities in Ukraine. If someone had been living under a rock for the past eight years and then read your comment, they would conclude that there was absolutely no reason for the West to oppose Russia, other than the West's own evil imperialism. Putin? Never heard of him. Ukraine got invaded? What's that about?
TL;DR: That's some major revisionism you've got going there.
The problem is that "history, patriotism, language, and culture" are what _enables_ Putin to be sufficiently dangerous for you to care - and to act with relative impunity while holding firm belief he can weather anything West can throw at him.
And you cannot deprive him of this without destroying all from which his beliefs came from.
I'm describing what I observe to be a mentality which is widespread in Europe, although I don't necessarily share it. I'm not taking sides. The European PMC prides itself in being post-more-or-less everything. It's a bland, homogeneous group of people, educated at the same universities, eating at the same restaurants in Brussels, speaking mostly rather indifferent English and, critically, largely thinking the same thoughts. All their lives, they have seen their woolly ideology, a kind of triumphalist mixture of neoliberalism and social justice warfare, creeping eastward, in an apparently unstoppable process of ideological normalisation. It took over the former WP countries, it has advanced (as they see it) in Africa and the Middle East, and of course Ukraine was in many ways the crown jewel of the whole process, the Good Russia, the example of a political and business elite appearing to buy into the European supranational ideas. Russia, insofar as it was ever really considered, was just a bigger and later version of Ukraine. But it didn't work out like that, and what we're seeing is what we always see when any normative system hits the buffers.
The Ukraine war shows another use for sanctions - denying resources to an enemy and reducing their ability to make war. Sanctions can do this directly, by blocking imports of machine tools, computer chips, and other essentials you need to build tanks and missiles, and also indirectly, by reducing the size of their economy and the amount of tax revenue they have to fund it.
I'm not sure this logic applies to all of the US's sanction targets, but there's good evidence it applies for Russia.
Were further citations removed from the review? Because there are a lot of extraordinary claims in it, and especially in the conclusions section I feel like some are not directly taken from the book either. I would like to fact check some of this before taking it at face value and without having to pay money for a potentially nonsense book. I guess it's a shame this book review provides no value in this case.
I think to anyone with a reasonable background of studying economic/public policy, none of these insights would feel particularly... Insightful. Public choice theory explains a lot of how govt behaves. My prior in any case was that the same would be true for how it behaves when it comes to foreign policy. Perhaps it is a paradigm shift for international relations? But I know very little about that field of study
Reading through this the first time, there was something strange that I couldn't quite put my finger on. But I think I've figured it out now.
Hanania criticizes US foreign policy for being an aristocracy. But what alternative does he present? "A monolithic agent capable of making rational decisions" who makes long term plans. This book is a criticism of the aristocratic US foreign policy establishment for not acting like an ideal monarchy.
Recognizing the monarchist worldview (at least for foreign policy) helps some of the weird things in the review fall into place. Why is there talk of the interests of the Gulf states or Russia, instead of applying the public choice model to them too? Why does the public appear as just another interest group that might influence the rational agent's designs?
Hanania's recommended legal reforms and norm changes seem unlikely to be effective. (He admits that they "are more or less impossible".) They're designed to weaken the aristocracy, but don't offer an alternative rational actor to make decisions instead. If they did, it would likely look like a philosopher-king.
There are two other similar books that I think would be more interesting: (1) Here's how aristocratic US foreign policy fails at the ideals of democracy. This would follow most people's intuitions about how government is supposed to work. (2) No actually, monarchies are better at foreign policy. Most people would not initially agree with him, but it would be interesting to see if he could make a good argument.
As for sanctions, I agree that they mostly don't work. The funny thing is that it appears that Russians themselves want the sanctions. Formally the government is against them of course, but the whole mood is that we can do without western imports and sanctions will only help us to reorient and strengthen our domestic industry.
It is complete madness however. I was comparing the current prices to those in the USSR during 1970s (relative to average salaries). Now food and services seem to be slightly cheaper than in the Soviet time but that can be easily explained by growing economy and raising incomes. The biggest difference is in manufactured (mostly western) goods which are now up to 50 times cheaper. It shows (another Bayesian data point) that even the Soviet manufacturing sector was very inefficient. Modern Russia has lost even that basis and without western imports it is a lost case. It is the hubris of the current leaders to think otherwise but let's not stop them in their self-destructive path.
The Soviet case shows that to achieve advanced manufacturing, central measures will not work. The government can help with tariffs, import rules etc. but we need honesty first and entrepreneurs who can be open and critical of everything. I think more about people like Elon Musk rather than Russian or Ukrainian oligarhs who mostly siphoned the value instead of creating it.
There is however Russian Yandex to match US Google - and nothing like that in EU. And "cheap western goods" rely in part on "cheap material and energy imports to West" (not only from Russia) - as we see with exploding Western inflation and energy prices.
The potential is there. Isolation isn't total. Knowledge and expertise necessary to build substitutes to revealed weak points exists; and sanctions provide political will to use it to that end rather then continue "business as usual".
However, Google is not some technology wonder. I don't even use it anymore, the default search in Edge (Microsoft Big) is fine. In fact, it is a tragedy that the smartest people in Silicon valley who could have developed new technologies are working on trivial things like how to better serve ads.
The popularity of youtube, twitter, facebook etc. are mostly due to the network effect not technological superiority.
I use Bing and Google on occasions and while Bing is "fine" as a search when you know exactly what you're looking for and willing to tweak query a bit Google is much better at "guessing what you needed from first query".
Russia seems to be a lot more advanced in "electronic government" access (with GosUslugi == GovServices providing most of functionality online) and electronic banking then most of Western world.
Most of "Western advantage" is institutional inertia rather then reality.
For example, for LNG Novatek did get Russian-produced LNG line. That obviously had some problems - real engineering rarely catches everything on planning stage. And it was previously easier to "just buy stuff that works" from West then work out all the kinks in manufacturing and operations to make it work. Now they don't have a choice and have to build up local expertise.
I personally never noticed google "guessing better". Probably google is optimized better for some people and Bing for other people.
Russia's better electronic banking? What are you talking about? As far as I can remember, up to very recently Russia didn't even had a national clearing system. Money transfers to one bank to another used SWIFT network and cost something like $20. Whereas the EU had developed IBAN system with unified account numbers and instant SEPA transfers, mostly free of charge which is clearly superior even to the US ACH system.
"Until very recently" - how recently exactly? Currently interbank transfers go through FPS; pretty much every Russian bank is connected at the moment.
From CBR site:
The Faster Payments System (FPS) is a service that lets individuals make instant (24/7) interbank transfers to themselves or other persons using a mobile phone number. The banks need to be connected to the FPS.
Customers can access the system via smartphone, tablet or PC using the mobile applications of banks connected to the FPS. In order to make an instant transfer, customers should select the account from which the payment will be made in the FPS Transfer section of their bank’s application and indicate the payee’s mobile phone number and the amount. After the payer has confirmed the transaction, funds are transferred and become available to the payee within seconds.
The Faster Payments System was jointly developed by the Bank of Russia and the National Payment Card System. It was launched and has been in commercial use since 28 January 2019.
Using phone numbers? Why are they necessary where simply bank account numbers are fine? And what if I have several bank accounts with the same phone number? That makes me think that this is some add-on system instead of a default payment mode from account to account.
Software isn't manufacturing. Modern advanced manufacturing is incredibly capital intensive and efficient with a multitude of different inputs and a mass of intermediate products. This makes the global market of advanced economies incredibly efficient, but also means there's a lot of things being made at only a few locations and the entire system is dependent on the collective worldwide network.
Russia, on it's own or in it's post-Soviet sphere, isn't nearly large enough, nor well capitalized, to replicate this on it's own. So a pariah Russia will become an inefficient and poor Russia, even more so than it was with the USSR.
Russia provides efficient inputs to a lot of European added value chains; cutting Russia from Europe/pushing it East also makes European manufacturing inefficient because global market was balanced around European access to Russian energy and metals (and replacements in many cases are scarce).
Russia is sufficiently well-capitalized to replicate some critical parts (and money are still flowing in), but not necessarily has enough consumers to make replacement production cheap.
Energy is highly fungible in the medium term, not at all like advance manufacturing. Russian energy exports aren't at all comparable in effect to losing access to things like German industrial equipment. It simply isn't the same thing at all.
Also capital isn't just money in this situation, it also technology and know-how Russia completely lacks and isn't remotely replaceable any time soon.
"Medium term" is quite long as far as energy requirements for entire Europe are concerned; from several years to several decades and there are multiple challenges along the way. Qatar so far refuses to consider less-then-20-years gas deal; Algeria is peeved at Spanish gas re-exports to Morocco.
Medium term should be sufficient to create advanced manufacturing at least for some parts. Some manufacturing is already in place and just needs to be adapted to serve new needs. For example, analogues of large gas turbines like currently used for Nord Stream 1 (and caught in sanctions, unable to be shipped after manufacturer repairs) are already produced in Russia; some LNG equipment is also already at testing stages.
Russia still has plenty of human capital and expertise. There is no "Western magic" that cannot be learned with effort - a lot of "Western power" was mostly in reliability and convenience, things that sanctions completely undermined.
Will that move Russia from "ideal cooperative efficiency"? Sure.
Will it make Russian manufacturing completely unable to function? Not necessarily.
Just like in Europe many companies become unprofitable and have to close at current energy prices, so will some export-oriented businesses in Russia (and rouble strengthening isn't helping there either).
But manufacturing serving local market - and possibly those that can re-orient toward Asia - should survive.
You're persistently failing to understand the scale of the issue. Natural gas and crude oil are two commodities used in bulk available globally to whoever touches tidewater.
Industrial components are thousands upon thousands of minor components, most of which are limited to a handful of producers, efficient production of which requires considerable learning by doing and trade secrets produce at modern standards, on top of industrial capital that it only pays off to invest in if your market is the world, not one declining middle income state. It's not a matter that Russians are capable as individuals, it's that no state of it's population size and wealth can go it alone at all efficiently. These are absurdly large problems you're handwaving at.
"a sentiment I share after reading about the East Asian economic miracle (the greatest anti-poverty program in history) facilitated by American intervention in How Asia Works"
Communist China did not make economic reforms due to American intervention. In your own review you note that Meiji Japan also enacted land reforms without the US. Instead the commonality between successful east Asian countries and less successful ones (Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia) is that the latter are located further south. The Philippines, after all, was taken by the US in the Spanish-American war and not fully independent until after WW2 (and afterward was a US client state).
The contrast with realpolitik is not that great, in my opinion. Mearsheimer, for example, also discusses "national" interests in terms of populations and special interests with collective features. The "public", for example, generally prefers security over chaos, and tends toward a collective national interest in that regard. Bismarck himself noticed that a safe political bet is on a conservative public that will sacrifice personal comfort for national glory.
One theory that I don't think gets enough play is the random events theory. For example, if Al Gore instead of George W. Bush were president at the time, it seems unlikely that the US would have invaded Iraq. But who got elected depended on random events in Florida during the previous election.
Similarly it seems like the US response to Ukraine had something to do with Biden being president, since Ukraine was already important to him. Would a second term Hillary Clinton or maybe a first term Republican (if she only got one term) have handled it differently? Maybe?
Neither "grand strategy" nor "public choice" hold up very well when you consider that US leaders tend not to be elected based on foreign policy.
More generally, it seems like any theory of history should be evaluated against a default assumption that history isn't predictable. What does a flat prior look like, and can you show that you can do better than that?
I think a flat prior would have to say that the US is equally likely to go to war with all countries. All IR theories can legitimately outperform this.
These aren't truly random events though. There's a certain menu of things that are likely to happen, and we pick randomly from that menu. Understanding how things end up on the list of things that _might_ plausibly happen should be the goal.
So, President Gore probably wouldn't have invaded Iraq. He probably would have invaded Afghanistan, though. He definitely wouldn't have invaded Uruguay or New Zealand.
This essay contains a bit of plagiarism. Read the paragraph that starts with "The culture war has morphed into a hyperreal form..." under the Russian Invasion of Ukraine section.
Then, read the comment I left on February 28, 2022 under a post on Richard Hanania's Substack. It's the top comment on that post.
I'm not sure how to get this to the attention of Scott since, as some people have pointed out, this review isn't anonymous either and last I checked that had not been noticed. However, you should point this out in a reply to a comment by Scott. That should at least send him a notification
For a book supposedly about foreign policy, according to review it discusses surprisingly little of the international circumstances or historical contingencies context that has resulted in the US military action and troop deployments across across the globe as it currently is.
The reviewer appears partisan, in not very bright way, for not discussing any of this when parroting stuff from the book. It also makes it a very bad review as a review, because mostly the author seems to just write quite opinionated statements as facts, sourced apparently from the book being "reviewed" ( "Once again, Hanania shows ... ", "It is clear to me that Hanania’s public choice model should usurp the conventional unitary actor model ..."). Genuine critical evaluation of the claims in the book, reviewing and checking it with information from other sources, as expected for a good review: not done at all.
Because the reviewer just says how Hanania is obviously correct about anything, the book's claimed superior rigor remains quite unexamined.
Some other supposed "book reviews" have been guilty of same lack of critical legwork, especially the fusion power book, but here the issues are glaring.
I am also dismayed by the lack of critical evaluation in this review.
There are also points where I see errors of fact and/or glaring omissions:
- "It’s difficult to see what threat the US is protecting against in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany ... the fall of the Soviet Union has not seen any withdrawal as promised to Gorbachev but rather expansion of troops right up to the border of the Russian Federation."
It's disputed just what the U.S. promised Gorbachev, which is addressed in a prior comment by nifty775. I therefore won't focus on that point. I read this statement, however, to maintain the U.S. hasn't withdrawn any military forces from Europe since the end of the Cold War. U.S. troop levels in Europe were ~340,000 in 1987, and up to that year had consistently been above 250,000 since the early 1950's. They declined to ~100,000 by 1995, hit a trough of ~65,000 in 2018, and recently increased to ~100,000. (Source: https://www.axios.com/2022/03/23/where-100000-us-troops-are-stationed-europe ) Perhaps the review's phrasing is simply unclear, but I read it to misstate the reality of this decline.
- "Step 4 of regime change has yet to happen as a result of the harshest sanctions against Cuba since 1959, Iraq since 1998, Syria since 2011, and Venezuela since 2019. The Bush, Clinton, new Bush, and Obama administrations all stuck to a policy of not speaking with adversaries, which is the opposite of achieving foreign policy goals by providing targeted regimes a clear path towards the removal of sanctions."
In at least one of the identified cases - Cuba - the U.S. in fact reinstated formal diplomatic relations in 2015 (during the Obama administration). Whether the U.S. and Cuba had been "speaking" even earlier is at least a matter of debate, because the U.S had a "United States Interest Section" in Havana from 1977 to 2015. That section was not formally an embassy, but it was staffed by U.S. Foreign Service Officers. Cuba similarly operated an Interests Section in Washington, D.C. from 1977 to 2015.
It's also striking that Iran and North Korea are omitted from this list.
At least every U.S. administration from Clinton onward held talks with North Korea, with the Agreed Framework of 1994 and discussions during the George W. Bush administration both following a general framework of "providing [the targeted North Korean regime] a clear path towards the removal of sanctions". U.S. policy toward North Korea is widely regarded as a failure because North Korea did ultimately develop nuclear weapons and has maintained a nuclear weapons program. It's also a clear case, though, of the U.S. pursuing its goals by speaking with an adversarial regime that's been targeted by sanctions.
Similarly, during the Obama administration the U.S., Iran, and five other countries signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Again, this agreement broadly followed "providing [the targeted Iranian regime] a clear path towards the removal of sanctions". (That agreement was controversial, and the Trump administration withdrew from it.)
- "The Pentagon has a budget of $700 billion for fiscal year 2019 (higher than it was at the end of the cold war even after adjusting for inflation)"
This claim appears to be true as stated. It's highly unusual, however, to use inflation adjustment as the sole metric (or even primary metric) for comparing budget spending over a period separated by several decades. It's more common to see the comparison stated in terms of GDP. By that measure, U.S. defense spending in 2019 is 3.7% of GDP compared to ~6% in the late 1980's. The Cold War-era trough for defense spending was ~5% of GDP in the late 1970's. (Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locations=US )
Isn't the book's treatment of the Unitary Actor Model/Realism something of a straw man? Presumably the UAM argument is that "American elites/leadership act as a single force in their own collective interest," not, "American foreign policy exists to promote the interests of every American, right down to little Timmy Terwilliger in Tinyville, Iowa." Iraq might have been great from the perspective of enforcing the global hegemony of America's rulers by visibly punishing an apparent defector (the less defecting the better, if you're trying to enforce "suck up to me or die" and have the means to do so). It's not clear why they'd care about dead soldiers/Iraqi's/whatever.
There's also a big jump from "It wasn't really about counterinsurgency or 9/11" to stating America's foreign policy is a by-product of elite competition; presumably the propaganda line is put out by a rational agent, and is almost a line against the public choice model as it requires conscious deception in the interest of a unitary actor. It's the equivalent of responding to, "The USSR pursued a grand strategy of dominating Europe," by saying, "No they didn't, they never empowered the proletariat at all."
The real question is whether the US oligarchy is too laden with defectors to act in its own self-interest. It may well be, but I don't think you can infer that it is from the fact that it successfully maintains a global hegemony.
My problem here- this book suggests a reality that is contrasted to some possible perception. Who actually has this pereption? Obviously there are different people and institutions who influence foreign policy in terms of some kind of general model of a strategy they think should guide foreign policy. But the book seems to set up a strawman to make its points in the form of contrast.
The strawman seems "not even wrong" to me. Its not even "who argues this?" He doesn't make it clear what the view he rhetorically writes as though he's arguing against would even coherently look like. At least from what I got from the review.
I'm very sympathetic to the overall thesis of applying public choice theory to international relations. I could draw many examples from other times and places. For instance, by declaring war on the United States the Imperial Japanese navy was able to prevent the Army from getting all the glory of the war in China and potentially reallocation of things like steal production to them. The British sent a lot of tea to Boston right before the American Revolution because most of the cabinet had East India Company stock, there was a tea glut, and they had to do something with the excess tea. The decision that the tea should be taxed was made at a much lower level and none of the cabinet was aware of it. Bismark's Germany allied with Austria-Hungary before WWI because if the later collapsed then the Austrian rump might have sought to join Germany, disrupting the preeminence of the protestant Prussians by adding too many catholic Austrians.
The above is all a bit caricatured, but I think no more so than the arguments the book seems to give according to this account.
The US wants to be a principled, benevolent force for freedom, happiness and prosperity. I never understood why it sometimes implements policies such as war on Iraq, given it had not solved Afghanistan at the time.
This book changed my view of the world by giving me a key of Public Choice Theory application to IR. It also gave me a wealth of information on past foreign policy anomalies.
It seems to me now that this imperialist aspect of America has come to be after the end of indian wars in 1880. Mahan theory provided the ideology and the steel trusts having completed the railroads and looking for new commissions provided the material basis for a navy. This has been instrumental in causing a global arm's race that led to WW1, and never abated in the last 140 years.
I am now wondering if we should see as an application of Arrow impossibility:
- dictatorships follow a single utility function and can optimize it rationally,
- democracies have many competing utilities being optimized. Hence the US is an unpredictable two-faced gods, sometimes peaceful, sometimes imperialist.
It seems natural that with so much power would come some policy mistakes, but the the IR competence level seems to be going down in democracies. Kennedy had a brain-trust with Kissinger and other scholars inviting European and third-world leaders to discuss policy, but not much occurred after the 90s Washington consensus. This gets replaced by the Bush crusades in Afghanistan and Iraq and Trump twitter trade wars and alternative pronouncement.
Is the US less competent now than they were in the last 140 years or does it come by waves?
> I never understood why it sometimes implements policies such as war on Iraq, given it had not solved Afghanistan at the time.
My recollection is that in 2002, it seemed like we had solved Afghanistan. A brief show of force, a couple of hundred casualties, and the Taliban scattered. A nice-looking bloke in a fancy hat became President and promised to hold free and fair elections. The whole thing had gone a lot easier than anyone imagined, and we started thinking "Oh shit, turns out we're invincible. We should start using this power for good" and we started making a list of other shit dictators who needed their asses kicked.
Turns out things were more complicated than anyone understood in 2002, but it all seemed pretty sensible at the time.
Overall, I really liked this review; I'm skeptical of the book's thesis (but much less so after reading this review than before).
One minor quibble though:
> Somalia and Yugoslavia are some of the least strategically important states in the 1990s
My understanding is that Somalia, like Cuba back in the day, is important for what it lies near - the international shipping route through the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, where Somali pirates are a problem that at the very least adds to the cost of shipping anything through there.
I think the Yugoslavia issue, apart from "genocide is bad", is that Europe was unhappy with the amount of refugees it was getting?
Does this book anywhere delve into the foreign policies of nations other than the United States of America?
Does it substantially discuss US foreign policy prior to the end of the Cold War?
Does it discuss *changes* in American foreign policy in the post-Cold-War era and how public choice theory led to those changes?
It seems to be discussing a general thesis that should apply to all nations (or at least all democracies) at all times, but from the review it supports that thesis by showing how closely it matches one data point: post-cold-war American foreign policy seen as uniform interventionism. One can of course fit an infinite number of curves through one data point.
Huh, you're right; the examples were all familiar and salient to me, so I didn't stop to think "hold on these are all from the same era in the same place."
I don't think I've ever had such a negative reaction to such a positive review. Like if you write a serious book about international relations I as a rando should not be able to identify howling factual errors in it by just skimming over a review. Hanania cites debunked studies, or studies so ludicrous that they don't even need debunking, as serious evidence that sanctions lead to mass death. Iraq has been covered but the entire methodology of the "40,000 excess deaths in Venezuela" claim is literally just that one guy, who is not a Venezuela expert and who admits that Venezuela's economic collapse predated the sanctions and would have happened anyway without them, guesses that the sanctions after 2017 made the collapse roughly twice as bad as it would have been, so he takes the number of deaths attributable to Venezuela's economic collapse from 2017 and divides it by 2 and says OK that's how many people the sanctions killed.
I also twigged on the claim that America, "blatantly violating international law," conducted 237 American military interventions between 1950 and 2017 (3.5 per year), which was immediately suspicious to me because it's a dramatically higher number than I've ever heard anyone claim, and I have heard a lot of dumb exaggerated claims about U.S. military intervention. This is based on a real but unpublished dataset, whose authors seem to tout a lot of incredibly dubious claims that they say their dataset supports. One of the things that they are specifically proud of is that they found twice as many "U.S. military interventions" as anyone else did before, both by using the most expansive definition of "U.S. military intervention" that they could, and by meticulously digging up "interventions" so inconsequential that it took intense research to find out that they even happened at all. The actual list isn't public anywhere that I can find, so I don't get to go down it and laugh at all the completely trivial "interventions," but at a minimum I can say it includes a great many embassy evacuation missions (probably they were only pretending to evacuate those diplomats, as a cover for some kind of atrocity) and the blatant international crime of having loaned three transport planes to the Congolese government during an army revolt in 1967. Another thing they seem to do is derive novel and extremely surprising findings that they admit are obviously puzzling, and then just treat them as true with no explanation of how they're not just obvious pseudo-results derived from dumb methods. Like they are very proud of finding that the U.S. actually got more militaristic and did more intervention abroad after the Cold War ended, which they tout over and over even though it's completely insane and obviously no-one should accept it on the level of evidence they have publicly made available. It really seems like all they've really found is that the U.S. military operated very dispersedly and did many individual small-scale peacekeeping and do-gooding missions, which technically counts as "more intervention" if the way you count it is that 10 six-month missions of 10 guys each count as "ten interventions," which is ten times as many interventions as the Vietnam War. They also tout a variety of times and places in which the U.S. purportedly "escalated" conflicts while its hapless adversaries sought "de-escalation," but it is not obvious that they are actually measuring this at all. For example they present it as damning that during a period when Mexico was overrun by rebels and bandits and had essentially no functioning government, the U.S. government sent troops in to shoot at those bandits (4/5 escalation units) while the Mexican government that barely existed and had no capacity to do anything did not in fact do anything (0/5 escalation units). They seem especially proud of the fact that this finding accords with the high prevalence of anti-Americanism in Mexico; actually one of the major themes of their research seems to be that Third World anti-Americanism is a reasonable phenomenon that exists because of real things America has actually done, and even provides a kind of direct evidence of American guilt.
I will stop going on about this particular source because I've already spent way too long on this comment and the point has basically been made. Hanania is full of shit and if you found his book impressively rigorous it is because you have no idea what you're talking about and don't recognize obviously stupid claims when you read them.
1.) My impression as well; thought this was pretty unconvincing overall, although I remember thinking the author's other review was decent. This one didn't attempt to analyze or question a single thing in the book and used language that boils down to "wow this is indisputable genius and would convince everyone in the entire field if only they read it". I, uh, did not find it so.
2.) This is an excellent and cogent response, but I worry that the "full of shit" part might get it deleted. I've seen similar characterisations pass unmolested, but maybe Scott will feel differently since Hanania is commenting? I dunno, maybe not — but I've saved it in case it gets deleted and you don't want to rewrite it all, just FYI.
I obviously didn't explain myself very well. I'm describing the mentality of the European PMC (I'm not really equipped to discuss the US equivalent) and it's Russia since 2000, rather than Putin, that's the problem. Russia in the European PMC mind is what it always has been: full of brutal, uncivilised untermenschen. Russia is the anti-Europe, the anti-Maastricht, the shadow that has to be eradicated for western civilisation to survive. It's not new, of course: I write from France, and eighty years ago, French volunteers were fighting in Russia against the brutal Slavic hordes, French manufacturers like Renault were delivering equipment to the Wehrmacht, the French media was full of hate propaganda, and the Swastika flew over Paris. After decades of suppression, the hate has burst out again.
I am genuinely curious: why do European governments do strategic business with Russia then? German industry is thought to be extremely dependent on Russian exports and the cheap and uninterrupted supply of natural gas - Russlandversteher is a word after all. And France has exported military kit extensively to Russia - the ultimately cancelled Mistral deal was/is just the tip of the iceberg.
Money has no smell, I understand, but to me European governments and European big business always seemed to be in a much closer cooperation with their Russian counterparts that the hatred you have just described would imply.
It's a good question, and there is no one explanation. It may be easier to turn it round, and ask what's missing? Any sense of a long-term political, economic and strategic relationship with Russia. Instead, we have a series of ad hoc arrangements based on energy costs, buying raw materials where it's cheapest, finding a market for certain products that Europe still makes, and so forth, with no coherent vision at all. It's not necessary a paradox, for example, to buy from or sell to people you privately despise. The relationship between Germany and Russia has been historically very complicated, to put it mildly, and in the French case, the urge to play an independent role in European issues, not subordinate to the United States, is still strong.
> After decades of suppression, the hate has burst out again.
I am curious, would you describe USSR as evil/murderous/bad/typical empire?
Or are you one of people who have no problem with USSR (or Putin's Russia) expanding to rule over Eastern and Central Europe, no matter what people living there want? Or equating "against communism" or "against USSR" with "supporting Nazis/being Nazis"?
My point is that the kind of feelings that have burst out now are independent of any developments in the Soviet Union/Russia. They are deeply anchored in the European psyche: I've argued that in some form they go back to the Middle Ages: https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/europes-inner-demons
I'm rather sceptical of your claim that there is a deep rooted hatred of Russia in the French population. As far as I am aware, they go far behind England and Germany in our little book of national hatred.
I think I made it clear that I was talking about a small part of the population of each European country: the political, media and intellectual classes. I agree with you about the French as a whole.
I don't think I agree either ? Especially in the French case. There is a deeply rooted fascination for Russian literature (and music), and politically we have been more prorussia than our ally during all the cold war.
>”It’s difficult to see what threat the US is protecting against in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany. The rise of China has not lead to increase in troop deployment in Japan or South Korea; the wars in the Greater Middle East has not resulted in the influx of the bulk of troops from the former Axis powers; the fall of the Soviet Union has not seen any withdrawal as promised to Gorbachev but rather expansion of troops right up to the border of the Russian Federation.”
American bases in the UK, Italy, and Germany do not exist because Uncle Sam believes that those countries will likely be attacked. They exist to ensure that if they are attacked, Americans will die in the initial exchanges, thus committing the U. S. to war against the aggressor(s).
This is going to sound uncharitable, but I suspect that reviewer here made a great disservice to the author by writing such adulatory non-review. Or perhaps not. Maybe the book is really as shallow as this makes it look, I am obviously not going to buy it based on this.
I like the parts describing how American foreign policy is captured by special interests, but I am surprised about the recommendations to Make Russia Great Again.
Is Pax Americana dead? From my perspective, the existence of NATO is the only reason why Russian soldiers are not patrolling on streets of smaller Eastern European countries such as Slovakia where I live. Because I have no illusion about EU willingness to defend its members; Germany and France would sell us to Russia in a heartbeat, if Putin in return offered them a small temporary discount on gas.
On the other hand, Russia is a super... what? Russia is basically Saudi Arabia with nukes. If the nukes magically disappeared today, Poland and Ukraine together could probably defeat them.
Allowing Russia to expand, by letting them take as much of Ukraine as they want to (which means the entire territory, according to Putin's own words), seems like the kind of "wisdom" that resulted in Munich Betrayal in 1938. Tomorrow you will have a Russia that is just as angry as today, only larger.
(By the way, is there any proof of the "withdrawal [of NATO] as promised to Gorbachev"? I see this mentioned all the time, but always without a citation. Who promised that, when, and using which words exactly? Also, is it possible that those words came with the assumption that Russia would become a democracy and stop attacking its neighbors?)
"We know what the Russians want. They have made clear, openly and consistently, that they do not want NATO to keep expanding." -- Yeah, that is a *part* of what they want. Also, it may be worth mentioning that the reason they do not want the surrounding countries to join NATO is because they plan to attack them and take their territory. (If you don't believe me, you may want to read e.g. "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians".) Because this changes the context a bit, doesn't it?
Yeah, all the discourse about "we should respect Russia's wishes" is unsurprisingly less common in countries which are under the direct threat of a Russian invasion...
As a Frenchman, I have to strongly protest your characterization.
Yes, the treacherous Germans would sell you out for gaz in a heartbeat. But our proud nation, which still has a lot of nuclear power production, wouldn't be so threatened by embargoes on Russian gas. We would sell you to Russia after *at least* twenty heartbeats.
This was a rather uneven and at times confusing review.
The author is very opinionated, and has a lot of axes to grind. It is difficult to see where the review ends, and his/her own opinions start. S/he (I suspect a he) is also fond of moralizing before doing the analysis, or instead of an analysis (doing it afterwards can be ok, but starting out with the moralizing usually reduces your IQ points by 10, as they say).
At the risk of sounding crabby, let me pick out some of the less certain statements, presented as truths:
“Pax Americana is dead, but a multipolar world will be more humane. “ Hah, yeah! Or: Be careful what you wish for. Many of us living in small European countries dread the coming instability of a multipolar world, which is why we are so deeply worried that hegemony seems to be slipping from the present “a house divided against itself cannot stand” – America.
The thing is that historically, periods without major world wars are periods where everyone knows that there is only one top dog, and that dog will win a major conflict. Even during the so-called cold war (1948-92), everyone knew deep down that even if there was a nuclear exchange, the US would highly likely come out on top. That is why all conflicts stayed local. Bring on genuine multipolarism – like the so-called “European concert” before 1914 – and sooner or later one of the large powers will risk it. Hell, why can’t the Republicans and Democrats bury the hatchet and make sure the US stays strong, so that us small-country folks may continue to sleep in peace? (The median country in the world has approx. 6 million citizens.)
“Public choice theory is better than realism” seems to me the main take-away of the review. The author seems to lump everything that is not “realism” into the public choice-bracket. But there are several other ways to analyse foreign policy. For example, everybody should read the fun-to-read classic by Allison, on the Cuban missile crisis (“reads like a novel”). He puts in one after the other a) the rational actor (RAT) interpretation of the crisis, b) the organizational process model, and c) the governmental politics-model. The last one seems close to what the author labels “public choice” by the way – though “public choice” is rather something in-between RAT and the other two.
Otherwise, the review seems to confirm the old political science - saying: “All foreign policy is at heart domestic policy”.
On Ukraine, here is the NATO line of thinking, as far as I can judge, and it is sort-of a RAT way of thinking: a) It will highly likely have to be a negotiated settlement, since Putin was unable to scare Zelensky into exile, or kill him. b) Zelensky must choose when to sue for peace, we will not (and likely cannot) do that on his behalf. c) Our choice in this situation is to provide Zelensky with the best possible bargaining position, come the time when he is ready for negotiations. This implies providing him with all the arms and other stuff he asks for, as well as sanctioning Putin to the best of our ability.
Again: The policy is about influencing the bargaining position of Zelensky, including making it credible to Putin that NATO will not suddenly waver – that would reduce his reason for accepting, or initiating, negotiations.
The author boo-hooing the sanctions is acting as a useful idiot (Lenin’s old phrase) to Putin. I would not mind that so much if it was a cynical move on behalf of the author, since I respect professional propaganda competence. But I have a distinct feeling that the author sincerely means what s/he says, and that is just irritating.
Sorry for the crabbiness, but I have visited Ukraine a few times, including the beautiful cities of Kyiv, Lviv (old Lemberg) and Odessa, so this is a bit personal.
To what extent does the message of this book come down to "Second approximation is better than first approximation"?
To first approximation, it makes sense to model countries as individual actors supporting their own interests. To second approximation, we need to zoom in and see that a country's policies are determined by multiple conflicting groups. That's fine; first approximations are easier to deal with, second approximations are more accurate but more complicated.
A better approximation still would be to realise that actually a country is made up of millions of people who all have their own individual beliefs and reasons for supporting them. That's a much better approximation, although the downside is that you can't meaningfully use it for predictions.
What is with the light blue background? I find it very difficult to read. Links are a slightly different shade and they almost disappear: I can see the words are there, but they're like blank spots as I'm reading smoothly - I have to stop and look at the links specifically to read the words. (Maybe it's just me - I also have a lot of trouble with white on black text). It's also a really ugly color - maybe that's why I find it distracting?
Did anyone else read the four proposed norm changes beginning with "the press" with a feeling of ironic sadness? I suppose it depends on what a person means by "the press", but i can't imagine even such modest changes being possible without replacing every single person currently employed by "the press". Indeed, treating of the military-industrial complex without recognizing that for a long time now it has been the military-industrial-media complex seems either naive or an attempt to avoid hit-pieces.
The notion that sanctions are ineffective at forcing governments to change their behavior (or causing them to outright fall apart) is flat-out false.
Examples of regime change (either via coup or otherwise) as a result of sanctions include:
* Iran in 1953
* Finland in 1958
* Ceylon/Sri Lanka in 1965
* Chile in 1973
* Lesotho in 1986
* South Africa in the 1990s
* Malawi in 1993
* Guatemala in 1993
Sanctions have also caused other desired behavioral changes, with threatened or actual sanctions causing:
* Yugoslavia to back down in 1921
* Greece to back down in 1925
* The Dutch to allow Indonesia to become independent in 1949
* India to change its agricultural policies in 1966
* South Korea to not buy a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in the mid 1970s
* Taiwan to abandon nuclear weapon development in 1977
* El Salvador not to release people who murdered Americans in 1988
* Albania to reduce the sentences of Greeks in 1995.
Sanctions are, in fact, highly effective at crippling governments. The reality is that being a pariah state not only makes it quite likely that your regime won't last, but also means that your country will deteriorate and not be economically relevant.
Where does this list come from? I would like to read the list compiler's explanation of why they think sanctions, not other factors, played the key role.
What was the chance the Chilean military would carry out a coup regardless? Think: right-wing Latin American military, socialist president... how many such situations DIDN'T end in a successful coup between 1945 and 1990?
What was the chance that the end of the Cold War would lead the apartheid government to negotiate with the ANC about peacefully ending apartheid regardless of whether there had been Western sanctions?
Malawi's Hastings Banda was born sometime between 1898 and 1906, and we're talking about an event in 1993. Think about him at that age. Against the backdrop of the end of the Cold War, and more-or-less free elections happening in a number of African countries, what are the chances he was going to give in anyway, due to running low on the energy needed to be a successful repressive dictator in a newly more challenging environment?
You are assuming it is just one factor that leads to a government being overthrown. It is often a combination of factors that, when combined, cause enough people to feel conditions are intolerable/feel the government is weak enough to be overthrown.
There was substantial popular support for the coups in Chile and Iran, as both of them were quite unpopular by the end of their rule, in part because these leaders ruined the economies of their countries, and in part because of their dictatorial, authoritarian nature and own coups that attempted to seize total control (Allende called for a revolution days before he was overthrown, Mossadegh ran a fake election to give himself absolute power shortly before he was overthrown as well).
The deterioration of domestic conditions often leads governments to fall apart or to have another group win the next election or whatever.
Sanctions also worked against Japan during World War II, as it was put in pretty dire straits by the US cutting it off, which caused Japan to attack the US in a war it had no hope of winning. But if Japan hadn't attacked the US, it would have been starved of fuel and unable to operate.
In fact, this is very frequently what happens; the sanctions put the regime into a lose-lose situation, where it either is going to lose power due to being unpopular, or has to crack down to avoid losing power.
Economic hardship is a common factor in the fall of governments; why would sanctions NOT have an impact?
Putin is terrified of being murdered by his countrymen because of the hell he has put them in as a result of his actions.
We appear to use 'as a result of' differently. Imagine I throw a rock at a house which is already sliding off the edge of an eroded cliff. To be thorough, I suppose, the house falls 'as a result of the erosion and the thrown rock'. I guess, technically, it's not untrue to say the house falls 'as a result of the thrown rock', so long as you are not also denying the erosion.
However, this isn't how I normally use English. Normally I focus on a subset of causes - those that play the 'key role', as I wrote above - because I care more about modeling reality than I do about philosophy (except in certain moods). Counterfactuals are philosophically rubbish, but we need them for modeling reality. This is why I am interested in guessing what would have happened in these cases without sanctions.
I would have to know more about most of these cases to have more confidence in my beliefs about whether sanctions were the key cause. This is why I asked you for the source of the list, so that I could go read it. Is it all your own research?
I don't know where you got the idea that I think sanctions normally have minimal impact, i.e. that I agreed more with Hanania than you about sanctions. My best guess is that your view is somewhat closer to the truth, i.e. it is less overstated. However, the advice that follows naturally from your view - use more sanctions - has not produced regime change (except through the intermediary of WWII) for the US's most threatening adversaries.
To answer your questions about why sanctions might not have an impact, the effect of sanctions might have an effect of minus 5 on government stability. But the resulting increase in nationalism, plus the leader's better justification for blaming failures on foreign meddling, might have an effect of plus 6. With a net gain of plus 1, that makes the government more stable. (This is not to mention the fact that less commerce reduces the chances for espionage, because spies can and do pose as foreign businesspeople.)
Your confidence about Putin's mental state suggests you may benefit from evaluating the sources of your own knowledge. I don't know what he is terrified of, if anything, and I don't expect to find out so long as he holds power.
My immediate thoughts on this are: While I normally like Richard Hanania for his insight into DOMPOL his FORPOL/IR take here is laughable, particularly of note is that unlike moldbuggian "cthulu always swims left" unfalsifiable claims, Hanania's articles on the CRA etc actually explain *how the left built the Cthulu* and that Cthulu isn't a liberal-progressive monster, it's a monster that draws its power from Moloch, and can be bred in a vat to do whatever you want.
"Soldiers have to be paid market salaries": LOL, LMAO. Basically anyone whose been in any nation's armed forces will tell you that's not the case.
A problem that I have with the arguments against interventions being a matter of great power competition are that the evidence presented has a hard time distinguishing between not being interested in great power competition and being interested in great power competition but being incompetent at it.
For example: "the war in Iraq did not in any way increase American power but rather empowered Iran"
The thing is, the planning and execution of that war are largely a matter of public record, and it's quite clear that empowering Iran was not the intended goal. The plan was to follow up the invasion of Iraq with regime changes of several other countries, concluding with Iran. A major contributor to how bad things went in Iraq was that those other countries (and particularly Iran and Syria) realized this and supported insurgents in Iraq in an attempt to stop the train right then and there before they too ended up on the chopping block. To put it another way, the war ended up empowering Iran because Iran's foreign policy elites beat our foreign policy elites in the game of geopolitical chess.
Another particularly weak point:
"It’s difficult to see what threat the US is protecting against in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany."
The reasons there...seem pretty obvious? The troops in the UK are there to control important strategic points in the North Sea. Italy is the same for the Mediterranean (plus bases in Italy have been used in interventions in North Africa such as in Libya). Germany is, depending on your level of cynicism (and these aren't mutually exclusive) to protect the rest of Europe from the threat of a rearmed Germany or to make sure that the one country that is theoretically capable of challenging US hegemony in Western Europe isn't in a position to do so. Bases in Germany are no longer very useful in keeping the Russians out (even now that we are actually concerned again about keeping the Russians out), but they're still very important to keeping the Americans in and the Germans down.
I felt like the Ukrainian case for public choice could have been much stronger. In fact, it seems to put the cart before the PCT horse by discussing the manufactured populism surrounding support of Ukraine in the war. (Not that this wasn't the natural course, given that Russia was the aggressor, but the positive feelings toward Ukraine seem manufactured to me.) It also seems to focus entirely on the West's response, assuming Russia's role to be a given and not subject to PCT itself.
The argument that the major players - most notably Russia - are really just responding to economic incentives surrounding oil and gas seems to fit the timeline and the choice of targets. For example:
2005 - Azerbaijan completes a pipeline through Georgia bypassing Russian pipelines to Europe; in response, the US supports Georgian entry into NATO
2008 - Russia invades Georgia to block NATO membership (and keep the potential for future annexation of the country/pipeline on the table)
Early 2010's - Massive reserves discovered in Ukraine (centered in Crimea, some near Lviv, and on a line from Donbass to Kiev) threatening Russia's market with Europe through their 'own' pipeline network
2011-2013 - Western energy company deals struck to explore new NG fields
2014 - Pro-western political revolution in Ukraine
2014 - Crimea invaded, Donbass war
2014 - Western petrol companies withdraw from Ukrainian projects
2022 - With gas prices high, Russia invades mostly territory rich in natural gas and coal
I'm not saying other causes aren't important. I'm saying if you're trying to advance a Public Choice Theory explanation for what's happening in Ukraine right now, it's odd to focus on public opinion (something that PCT would see as downstream of root causes) and not on economic forces, like competition for the European energy market.
What of the Western response? Some actors in Europe wanted a quick end to the conflict - i.e. before winter when Russia could hold Europe hostage by limiting oil and NG exports, as they've done to Ukraine directly in the past. The US and others want the war to grind on for years so Russia isn't able to compete in other areas globally, making it unlikely the war will end by winter and requiring a new strategy to handle the winter energy supply problem.
Some countries began stockpiling NG supplies during the summer, in preparation for winter cutoffs from Russia. So Russia slowed NG deliveries through Nordstream 1 and other sources, forcing the Europeans to liberate stockpiles and keeping them from accumulating enough to take the pressure off this coming winter. In response, Lithuania cut off railway supplies to Kaliningrad. This was an implicit threat to Russia that if they try to hold Europe hostage this winter by cutting off NG supplies, the West can in turn cut off all supplies to Russians in Kaliningrad (since Russia doesn't have any other Baltic Sea ports that don't freeze over in the winter, they wouldn't be able to resupply by sea). Moves and counter-moves, all centered around energy supply issues now and into the future.
(If a PCT explanation surrounding energy supply is truly the tail wagging the dog in this conflict, we would expect Russia's threat to cut off NG supplies to Europe this winter to be mostly bluff. They could cut off NG for short periods of time - a couple of weeks maybe - but Russia is funded by those sales, so they can't afford to cut off that market completely. Indeed, the longer they force Europe to do without, the more Europe will find ways to cope and the smaller the market for Russian energy going into the future. There's an old saying that when you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank owns you; but when you owe the bank a billion dollars, you own the bank. In that sense, Russia is dependent on the European market as much as the Europeans are dependent on Russian energy. Thus, the dance at the periphery to edge out competitors without alienating the market. A quick Ukrainian war would have accomplished that goal, but a protracted conflict gives opportunity to Russia's energy competitors.)
The war has strengthened NATO as a military alliance. As such, it is providing new arms sales and expanding markets into Eastern Europe - good for arms sales. Meanwhile, it has put pressure on countries throughout Europe to build out energy infrastructure that's independent of fossil fuels. Once Putin cut himself off from that conversation by invading, pro-nuclear/solar/wind/electric vehicle/etc. interests became free to lobby for increased subsidies and urgency in expanding their own roles in the energy production/consumption markets throughout Europe.
> Second, the public is ignorant of foreign affairs, so those who control the flow of information have excess influence. Even politicians and bureaucrats are ignorant, for example most(!) counterterrorism officials — the chief of the FBI’s national security branch and a seven-term congressman then serving as the vice chairman of a House intelligence subcommittee, did not know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.
Wow. This is an amazing fact, if true. Is there anyone who's read the book who can point me to the citation?
It's very odd behavior. Calling people sociopaths who disagree with you politically is a very well-worn canard but it honestly seems like he's on the sociopathy spectrum; he hates on people without much pretense of justification and in ways that seem obviously harmful to his own reputation. Of course conservative pundits (and just pundits in general) perform fake or exaggerated hatreds for instrumental signaling reasons all of the time, but it's not clear how a guy with Hanania's career arc benefits from doing a bunch of dumb tribal conservative signals. He's almost certainly never going to be a regular Fox News guy, because he is a weird nerd with a weird voice who makes weird grimaces and gestures while thinking about stuff; his natural audience seems to be mostly liberals, or at least people who are not invested in dumb tribal conservative signaling culture. I personally don't really care that he seems like a complete asshole, or see that as a good reason to stop reading him, but I assume most liberals are not like that.
In a piece on his substack he openly admits that his cultural worldview is based entirely on an aesthetic rejection of people that aren’t like him.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-do-i-hate-pronouns-more-than
Richard, stop saying "um".
Don’t watch cable news. Is that Tucker guy always such an asshole? Is he the one who did his show from Hungary?
I guess he’s never seen a US software development team. Or a staff of hospital MDs. Or the crew that put new siding on my house. Or about 1/4 the population of the city I live in.
That's the point, fren. You are allowing faceless corporations to save a buck by hiring slightly cheaper and sometimes less skilled labor. This is good for the corporations, it's good for the immigrant employee who is making more than they would in their home country, and it's good for people who want their house sided for 10% cheaper than it would cost to have an American do it .. this system is not good for American workers who get laid off or miss out on training opportunities or are forced to work for less.... But I can read you better than that, you're _proud_ to live in a city that's 25% immigrant! (There are around 20 US cities with foreign born population that high and not a single one of them is doing what I would consider "well"), but regardless you make it clear that your concerns don't lie with the American workers ... Another group I guess that I could mention that is severely impacted by this strategy is... Literally everyone else. Did you know that India has been struggling with a severe shortage of doctors and healthcare workers for several decades now? Currently India has about 5 doctors and 6 nurses for every 10,000 citizens.. The World Health Organization has set a minimum acceptable threshold for doctors and nurses combined at 44.5/10,000. This is even further skewed when comparing rural India, which essentially just exists without medical intervention. Some villages literally chase away foreign healthcare workers with torches and pitchforks because it is such an abstract concept to them. Good job on getting some paneling put up on your house though, diversity is our strength says every fortune 500 company.
No I don’t think you have my number. You have a fabricated caricature of someone you imagine to be your enemy. I don’t watch cable news but I’ve now seen enough YouTube video of Tucker Carlson to know where the fabricated caricature originated.
Fare thee well and have a good day.
Why is whataboutism bad?
The kind of arguments that get labeled "whataboutism" have always seemed fair to me.
Whataboutism just means to beware isolated demands for rigor:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/
I'm not even sure that Hanania is committing "whataboutism" here at all.
He's saying that the idea that the US must help Ukraine because it's a democracy fighting against a dictatorship is flawed, because Ukraine is not actually democratic. I don't know if it's true that it is not democratic. But if it's true, then what's wrong about Hanania's point? He does not claim to refute in that video all the possible reasons to support Ukraine, just a particular one.
I don't think the word is specific to that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
> because Ukraine is not actually democratic
No idea what is the basis of this claim. Note that previous Ukrainian president was voted out.
Thank you for that, that's enough for not taking him seriously. He doesn't even know that previous Ukrainian president, Yanukovich, wasn't really overthrown. He fled, didn't show up to work.
Wouldn't that mean many eastern European states could continue lobbying?
Someone like Radosław Sikorski having influence in Washington would be Hanania's worst nightmare regarding US-Russian relations, a Liberal elite from a ex-Warsaw pact NATO member state.
It wasn't obvious to me that he makes that presumption. It's just that, if there is such a thing as international law, then the UN is it; and America doesn't do what the UN says; therefore the claim that the USA is promoting a law-abiding international order doesn't seem to stand up. I don't think there's a normative claim that it would be good to comply with the UNSC's rulings; only the empirical observation that the USA doesn't.
Those ordinary members of the public relied almost entirely on media pundits and government officials to form their opinions; they had no personal experience with Iraq or the Iraqi regime they could use to assess the claims they heard. So effectively the special interests controlled the majority opinion.
The claim:
"Foreign policy elites are able to persuade the public, and then the government responds to popular opinion."
is very different from the claim:
"The government responds to foreign policy elites, regardless of popular opinion."
The first claim is how democracies are supposed to work. The government listens to the people. Experts try to persuade the public, and the ideas that persuade most people get enacted by the government. Maybe this isn't always the best idea, because democracy is messy, but as supporters of democracy we think it's better than all other systems.
This review seems to be claiming the second one. The government responds to the will of special interests, not to a grand strategy or to the public.
When it comes to domestic issues, like the economy, crime, education, abortion, immigration, etc, citizens can see what is going on with their own eyes, in their daily lives. That limits the power of media and "experts," and the special interests that fund them, because if their narrative diverges too far from reality it will become obvious. For example, if the media says crime is down, but I talk to store owners in my area and they all say they are suffering badly from shoplifting, I'll be at least somewhat skeptical of the media claims.
In contrast, ordinary people generally don't directly experience what is happening abroad. If the media and the experts say Slevobia's government is oppressive and has WMDs, there's not much I can do to verify whether that's true. Having never been to Slevobia, and knowing nothing about its language, culture, history, or politics, I have no way to evaluate the claims I hear about it.
There are lots of issues which are important, but which most citizens don't have personal experience with. For example: There are 1,000 cases of a new disease in the country, so how should we respond?
What should then happen in a democracy is a public debate. Different groups propose different solutions to the problem (including "Do nothing") and try to persuade as many people as possible. If some group is able to persuade a majority of the population that <X> is the right action, then the government should respond by doing <X>. That's what a government that represents the people should do.
Now maybe what the public wants is the wrong choice. In which case, the people who know better should try to do a better job of convincing more people.
Is the problem that the government listens to special interests instead of the people? Or is the problem that neoconservatives are really persuasive?
I find this argument a little odd. It's probably true that many Americans couldn't fund Ukraine on a map before the war, and we rely a lot on journalists to know what's happening there. However, surely what the media reports has something to do with what is actually happening, and reporting the basic facts about Russia invading Ukraine is something we can count on the media to do.
This isn't just an opinion of experts. While we shouldn't naively assume that what's reported in the news is just reality, but neither does it have nothing to do with reality.
There is also some (limited) cross-checking via social media. We can't verify what's going ourselves, but many Europeans can. Many people know someone from Ukraine well enough to talk to them. It's possible to post pictures on Twitter, and other people can geolocate them. And so on.
Thanks to the Internet, we actually do have reasonably good communications with people in many other countries, including Ukraine. It seems weird to ignore that?
What parts were idiosyncratic, if you don't mind me asking?
There were multiple grammatical errors (e.g. using a plural verb with a singular noun) and a lack of parallelism (e.g, the lists)
That's funny, I think I've spent long enough on the internet that I now subconsciously ignore minor errors.
Could you cite an example of the first kind of error? My best attempt at using ctrl + f to scan for the mostly likely words to get misused this way failed.
e.g. "any leader willing to dismantle their WMD program and ally themselves with the US in the war on terror *were* destined to be killed" asterisks mine
Thanks. I just wanted to check that it wasn't a "collective noun" type of situation. Funnily enough, I did use "were" as a keyword, but I guess "leader" was too far away from it for me to notice while doing a quick scan.
I would also note "public" as a collective noun functioning as a plural is uncommon, at least for my vernacular (Californian English)
E.g. it sounds unnatural to me to say "the public are waiting"
My thoughts:
- The book's examples of public choice failure include some classics (corporations, foreign powers), but also some strange ones. Ukraine is a public choice failure because . . . the American people really support Ukraine, and the government acted on this? Iraq was a public choice failure because the neoconservative movement, which included most of the national security establishment, was behind it? Maybe the full book had this, or maybe people who actually understand PCT know all this stuff already, but I would have appreciated more of a background in what makes something a PCT failure as opposed to just democracy as usual. Is any incorrect decision always a PCT failure?
- I know at least one of the "sanctions caused massive death toll" studies turned out to be embarrassingly fake and wrong, I don't know about the others.
- Even if sanctions don't postemptively cause regime change, the threat of sanctions still acts as a deterrent. I wonder if Hanania is also against mass incarceration, another policy that inflicts punishments that cause a lot of suffering on people but which we still do in the hopes of deterring bad behavior.
> The Ghost of Kiev was clearly fictional from the beginning, yet it was repeated breathlessly and all critics were dismissed as 'Putin apologists'.
In my circle the most rabid Ukraine supporters were making fun of this claims.
Oryx (the one with tracker of confirmed losses) from start dismissed similar stupidity as low quality propaganda.
> Meanwhile, pointing out indisputably true facts got you banned or labeled and shadowbanned. See: biolabs in Ukraine
Depends on what you mean by that, some forms (USA makes biological weapons at border with Russia!!!!!1 Confirmed1!!!!1) variety were uncritically repeating Russian propaganda. And actually true was irrelevant and not very interesting.
Is there evidence that sanctions act as a deterrent? Usually leaders get more popular in wartime. The poor and middle class will suffer but Putin can still have anything he wants*.
* except international vacations, but that can be accomplishes by just denying visas to powerful politicians.
Depend what the goal is. To quote one Russian Academic:
"What would moral crusade oriented sanctions look like? Inflict economic damage, so that population revolts and overthrows the regime. That's an imbecile idea that never really worked and probably never will. Goal-oriented sanctions look differently. Maximise systemic shock in order to paralyse technological chains. That will lead to a military defeat, which will entail the fall of regime. That's a great idea which usually works. It worked out with the USSR for example"
https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1501676859741904898
It seems to me that the more systematic shock to an economy, and the more GDP decreases, the more military spending goes up. See North Korea.
I could see targeted sanctions like banning computer chips or military part exports being justifiable.
North Korea isn't launching an invasion at the moment, with the outcome of which having a huge impact on the legitimacy of the ruling elite.
Like he says, depends on what the goal is. Sanctions dont work to weaken a dictator's grip on his own country, but they make work to weaken the ability to project power and maintain a military capable of foreign operations. Military spending may go up, but if general technology, economy, and resources go down, the quality of said military and its ability to adapt, project force, build new weapons systems, etc might go down. The relative quality of Saddam's army no doubt went down from the time of the Iraq War to Operation Enduring Freedom or whatever.
Allende and Mossaddegh both were overthrown in coups that were caused by economic sanctions.
The same happened in Sri Lanka in the 1960s.
Sanctions that completely cripple a country's economy often result in that regime being overthrown.
Deterrence is also an important goal. Setting the norm that of you invade a sovereign state without provocation your economy will be destroyed and you'll become an international pariah seems like a useful thing if you want less of that to happen in the future.
The reason why the Russians are lying about this is because they're terrified.
Examples of times that sanctions have caused regime change:
* Iran in 1953
* Finland in 1958
* Ceylon/Sri Lanka in 1965
* Chile in 1973
* Lesotho in 1986
* South Africa in the 1990s
* Malawi in 1993
* Guatemala in 1993
Russia's economy is significantly reduced in size and their ability to operate in international institutions has been destroyed. Having a lot less resources and power seems to rather limit "getting what he wants" as he has less power to effect the world. Unless you are talking about the purely personal level. In which case it's irrelevant.
>Unless you are talking about the purely personal level. In which case it's irrelevant.
A lot of people I've talked to in person who seem very emotionally invested in their opposition to Putin seem to believe that the sanctions will harm him at the personal level, and that he does care about how many billions he has in his bank account more than he cares about adding "Conquerer/Re-uniter of Ukraine" to his biography.
They're so divorced from the worldview of "Imperialism" if you will that they're seemingly incapable of considering someone for whom "personal fortune" is not a primary motivator. And they don't seem to understand that being the autocrat of a country of 140M people puts you in the same relative status position whether you have $10 billion or $1 Billion.
Putin is terrified of being assassinated or overthrown in a coup.
The sanctions have put him in massive danger, because there's a lot of people who DO care about not being poor.
Would apartheid South Africa be a good example of sanctions working?
Difficult to say, because many other factors were in play and apartheid would have ended eventually with or without sanctions. And that's the problem; it's not obvious when sanctions work, only when they fail.
* Iran in 1953
* Finland in 1958
* Ceylon/Sri Lanka in 1965
* Chile in 1973
* Lesotho in 1986
* South Africa in the 1990s
* Malawi in 1993
* Guatemala in 1993
Sanctions have killed a lot of governments.
People just try to make excuses.
It's also worth noting that sanctions against Iraq pretty much made it impossible for Iraq to fight back militarily against the US in any sort of meaningful way, and Japan attacked the US during WWII because US sanctions on Japan made the Japanese position untenable in the long term, which then led to the US entering and winning World War II.
Sanctions have caused a large number of governments to fall and many others to cave in.
Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973 are both obvious examples.
In the book, there's a detailed discussion about studies on the effects of sanctions, you're right that some of them are bad. I talk about the uncertainty, and provide a more moderate estimate for Iraq in the 1990s than what has been reported. The chapter on sanctions is derived from an earlier report I did for the Cato Institute, so you can get most of the arguments here.
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/ineffective-immoral-politically-convenient-americas-overreliance-economic-sanctions
The anti-sanctions discourse relies on flashy studies with high death counts, but we shouldn't ignore the massive economic damage, which is more certain and also a major problem.
As for sanctions acting as a deterrent, it's plausible, though hard to prove. They don't work in the vast majority of specific cases where they're applied, which is usually the justification for sanctions in each specific case. I can't prove it, but I suspect that governments that really value economic growth have other reasons not to engage in bad behavior, while those that don't care about economic growth like North Korea are not going to change their behavior based on sanctions. If you look at specific cases, the US usually doesn't give the target regime a path to get out from under sanctions (or even talk to it at all!), and it sure looks like punishment for psychological and political reasons rather than like it's directed towards any goal. If sanctions do accomplish something in deterring bad behavior among others, it's probably by accident more than design.
All the classics are good, but I've never felt a deep dive into PCT was really all that necessary. The most important ideas are pretty simple to grasp, yet provide a great framework through which to understand politics.
I always appreciate author commentary along the lines of "here's were I object to the characterization of the review"
Last contest review, the reviewer replied to comments. This one the author of the reviewed book itself is responding. This seems… unusual.
Okay.
What do you mean by "unusual"? I guess you mean "a bad thing" or do I mis-understand?
No. Not a bad thing. Just not what I would normally expect in a book review discussion, particularly in the context of a book review contest.
Scott's blog is not some hidden corner of the internet far away from the public eye. Like it or not (And I'm going to assume he likes it, or at least appreciates the supplemental substack income) Scott is a minor internet celebrity and is often a bigger name than the authors of most of the books reviewed. There isn't a lot to be done about this, except for shutting the blog down (But in a more permeant way that doesn't result in it coming back twice as big...again).
I think you might have misunderstood my comment. It’s just rare to have the author of the book being reviewed directly responding to comments on a review of that book. No shade on anyone intended. It felt like a bit of, I dunno, recursion? A strange loop?
I'm pretty sure I saw one of the authors of the fusion power book in the comment section there as well.
Surely, focusing on case studies where sanctions occur is incredibly misleading if the "purpose" of sanctions is deterrent. Shouldn't you be focusing on when a "bad" state wants to do something but doesn't because of the threat of sanctions? I am unaware of any research on this, but I do want to note that this seems like a very poor methodology.
There isn’t a good methodology that I’ve seen that can answer that question. I’d say the burden of proof is on those who want to wreck the living standards of other countries.
Your linked article is a great overview of the sanctions lit and goes further, highly recommended, thank you.
The part of the academic sanctions critique I struggle with is the implication that we have, in the paradigmatic case, a strong moral obligation to continue economic entanglements with genocidal authoritarians.
We get to that part of the analysis and I throw up my hands, assuming we must have failed to carry a two at some point.
Best I can figure is that a first-order utilitarianism (failing to consider moral hazards) just leads to perverse results in hostage crises, and international human rights issues often pose similar problems. (For example, Saddam exploited concerns about sanctions impacts by diverting permitted aid from vulnerable populations, exacerbating the impact and fueling further critiques. If the critique is compelling, if we suspend sanctions once a country starves enough of its population, it creates a pretty bloody equilibrium.)
Hopefully I'm making a basic error that's obvious to someone better versed in this domain. Maybe there are other strong proven tools for compellence and deterrence we're leaving on the table?
What am I missing?
(Despite this small gap in views, genuinely appreciate your work and comments, thanks.)
For most of American history, the federal government let people deal with pretty much whoever they wanted to abroad except in wartime. It was caveat emptor, the US wouldn't bail you out if you got in trouble, but you could seek business opportunities abroad. So there's no affirmative obligation for the US gov to do things with other countries, it should just get out of the way.
Furthermore, I think there's a mistake to simply group leaders into a "genocidal dictators" category and a non-genocidal dictator category. Leaders when they do bad things are usually responding to some kind of threat, when we increase the threat to them we make atrocities more likely, this is I argue what happened in Syria.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00396338.2020.1819653
Given how the US reacted to 9/11, I'd hate to see what we would do if religious fundamentalists took over large swaths of our country, like they did in Syria.
That September 2020 piece gives me a much clearer picture of your views. I'd urge all other commenters read it.
You level a powerful critique of the madman theory--that some foreign leaders are simply raving psychopaths trying to maximally harm others even when idle.
Even so, some communists purge the doctors while others don't. So I'm still grappling with how far this takes me.
Outside influences are a factor, sure, and sometimes the West has really naive expectations about what concessions are possible or realistic. I think those are both really powerful points.
I remain separately concerned about moral hazards. From your article:
"The literature consistently shows that mass killing is rare because states would rather not engage in it. A regime committing atrocities can find itself an international pariah..."
Sorry for the unfair quotation, but that seems noteworthy!
If instead troubled states get more engagement and assistance, the incentives could flip.
Your initial appeal to historical American precedent and federal interference with business is well taken, just too much to unpack there, I'll definitely reflect on it.
My key update: I'll pledge to push back against "pure madman theory" when I encounter it, even though I suspect there are some softer variations that might slip past the arguments you've laid out so far.
You've been very generous with your time, thank you.
Do you agree with
> It’s difficult to see what threat the US is protecting against in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany
part, or is it mistake made by a reviewer? Or opinion that you changed?
Or are you not considering Russia as a threat?
(sorry if you are a different Hanania)
I wondered about this too.
> we shouldn't ignore the massive economic damage, which is more certain and also a major problem
So you agree that sanctions can at least cause this?
Do you agree that massive economic damage is reducing ability of a country to wage modern war?
I think that answer is "yes, yes".
This is enough by itself for me to support sanctions on Russia (including ones more damaging to my own wealth than to Russian wealth, as long as this factor is not too large - say within 2).
Well, it seems that Russia has plenty of artillery and weapons, its limiting factor is manpower, which it needs to occupy land and territory. Putin seems unwilling to declare a general mobilization for domestic political reasons. If anything, American sanctions and hostility to Russia are probably making his job easier by unifying the country.
> has plenty of artillery and weapons
Modern ones are far more limited, especially things like precision-guided munitions, drones etc.
And current war results in massive losses of other equipment where their supply is also not infinite, and rebuilding more complicated. Hopefully soon their will lose enough equipment that mobilization would not help anyway.
If sanctions are making a dictator's job easier, I would expect dictators to make up stories about imaginary sanctions. They would get the benefits of unifying the country, without the costs. Just blame any shortage on sanctions.
Maybe not an exact match but areas and countries occupied by USSR were forced to reject Marshall Plan. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan#Compulsory_Eastern_Bloc_rejection
This is exactly what is happening in Cuba, as far as I could observe.
A lot is blamed on US-led sanctions, while in reality the US is Cuba's largest trading partner, especially for daily needs. A lot of food is imported from the US, for example chicken: Without those imports, there would have been no meat available in many restaurants, especially the state-owned ones, while I was there at the beginning of this year.
Most of goods under sanction from the US are those, that Cuba would be hard-pressed to afford anyway: (High-)Tech.
What they do need, they get from mostly China or France. You can see some large construction sites in Havanna for high-end hotels being built with the most modern equipment from Europe (amidst the rubble and the standstill of the 50s era infrastructure).
Russia is running so low on modern weapons that they're bringing 50 year old planes and missiles out of storage. They've basically completely run out of cruise missiles, and due to sanctions don't have the ability to produce more, as modern designs rely on western chips. See https://medium.com/@x_TomCooper_x/supplement-of-backfires-and-kitchens-ef0088f33722 who I've generally found to be more accurate and less excitable than most commentators on the war.
They also were observed using anti-ship missiles to strike land targets what may be incompetence or triggered by running out of more fitting missiles (or misclassification of missiles by the commenting person)
Those missiles have always had a secondary land-attack capability, less accurate than Kalibr or Tomahawk but still useful against soft targets. And since Ukraine doesn't have a navy to speak of, it's not incompetence to use dual-mode naval missiles against land targets.
It does as you note suggest that they are not lavishly supplied with more modern and accurate weapons. "Running out" is probably an overstatement, because they've almost certainly got a substantial reserve stockpile labeled "for use against Real NATO only". But, less capable of damaging Ukraine's Western cities going forward.
I'm deeply curious, how does your work seem to be received among the people in the IR field and foreign policy community?
Sanctions actually work more often than not. Examples of regime change due to sanctions:
* Iran in 1953
* Finland in 1958
* Ceylon/Sri Lanka in 1965
* Chile in 1973
* Lesotho in 1986
* South Africa in the 1990s
* Malawi in 1993
* Guatemala in 1993
Not to mention achieving political goals via sanctions or the threat of sanctions:
* Yugoslavia to back down in 1921
* Greece to back down in 1925
* The Dutch to allow Indonesia to become independent in 1949
* India to change its agricultural policies in 1966
* South Korea to not buy a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in the mid 1970s
* Taiwan to abandon nuclear weapon development in 1977
* El Salvador not to release people who murdered Americans in 1988
* Albania to reduce the sentences of Greeks in 1995.
The notion that we don't usually give a route out from sanctions is false. For example, the Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 gave pretty clear requirements.
@Scott I'm replying directly to you in the hopes that you see this message quickly. The author of this review has revealed his identity by linking to a review he wrote. I suggest removing that link (search for "I've reviewed").
That other one was was also a too credulous review of a slightly heterodox view.
On the Ukraine part, probably worth putting in the context of the authors earlier views on Ukraine, where he thought they would fold quickly to Russia, and seems to see the conflict as an extension of American culture wars? https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1486879207313457153?t=uilhSMCGtyRvmeeFq_HFMA&s=19
Oh, that explains a lot, thanks for posting this. For Twitter haters I copied part of it (is it published somewhere in a sane format):
account Noah Smith:
(...)
> Hanania argues that an insurgency in Eastern Ukraine would be impossible because it's steppe; there's nowhere for rebels to hide.
> But where did the insurgents in Iraq and Syria hide? Western Iraq and Eastern Syria are completely open and flat.
> The insurgents hid in cities, towns, and villages.
(...)
> Finally, Hanania says that Ukrainians aren't willing to fight for American liberal ideals -- but then demolishes his own point when he notes that what they're actually fighting for is nationalism!
(...)
> His post is all about America -- what America wants, American values, and blah blah blah. His analysis of Ukraine's fighting spirit and ability is based entirely on a brief glance at its geography and population statistics, not at its recent history or politics or anything.
> As for me, I don't actually know how a Russian invasion of Ukraine would go, or how successful or sustained a Ukrainian insurgency might be; but I do know I wouldn't form a thesis about it on grounds as shaky as this.
> But Hanania doesn't care about Ukraine at all, he's just trying to own the libs in the American culture wars. So of course Americans who agree with him about those culture wars lap this stuff up, because they, too, want reasons to think the American libs suck.
(...)
Midde ground: imho sanctions almost never suceed in causing regime change (I do not know enough about South Africa to conclude whether it was an exception), but they can be effective in forcing regimes to change their policy. Like Iran scaling down its nuclear program, or Russia partially backing off its previous invasion of Ukraine in 2014
And they can be particularly effective at crippling the _power_ of an enemy. Regime change in Russia because of sanctions is unlikely - hurting the capacity to wage war is a certainty.
> Ukraine is a public choice failure because . . . the American people really support Ukraine, and the government acted on this?
I believe the point is to compare PCT to RCT. From RCT perspective, the steps America is doing in foreign policy makes no sense. This is considered bad, because if the steps are irrational, they might cause harm to US people (e.g. by spending taxpayers money needlessly). Although the government is doing what people want in Ukraine, (1) this choice might be easily manipulated by various stakeholders (see Section 2), and thus (2) this choice might not be rational for America.
Great example from Ukraine are gas/oil sanctions. The talks about these sanctions have increased the prices of these commodities so much that Russia currently has the highest profits ever. This is exactly the opposite of what a rational actor would want to happen to Russia. Yet the public-facing decisions around the sanctions made it possible.
But this argument effectively assumes that public either supports policy that is in its self-interest, or is manipulated.
An option that public supports idealistic policy even it will cost them out of genuine idealism is thus ruled out by definition. Since genuine idealism of course exists among people, it seems like implausible prior.
Incarceration may reduce mortality substantially among those imprisoned, relative to control group of charged-but-not-incarcerated people.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3644719
Supposedly prisoners even have a saying about this- 'prison preserves you'. You're forced to lead a fairly regimented life with little drugs or alcohol- yes they do smuggle some in, but vastly less than what someone could realistically get on the street. Exercise is famously popular with prisoners. I'm sure the food isn't great, but you are at least served 3 meals a day.
Imagine what would happen if they forced everyone to achieve a GED before they left
You're making a slightly different argument then mine but I think it's a fundamental criticism. The argument has presented seems "not even wrong" because the author is so vague about what term means and exactly what his thesis is supposedly contrasting against. It seems like a bit of a mishmash of things. Like he has something he thinkg he is trying to say but doesn't know how to articulate or think about it clearly in a way where he can express it coherently.
For myself, I was tepidly in support of the Iraq war Back in the Day because Amnesty International convinced me that sanctions were killing far more Iraqis than could plausibly be killed in an invasion of Iraq.
Hi Scott- replying directly to you to let you know that this book review contains plagiarism. See my earlier comment:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-public-choice-theory/comment/7349428
Are there any reliable poll showing that the "he American people really support Ukraine"? I'm asking because European media & politicians are 1000% behind arming the Ukraine, but we do have opinion survey data showing that most people are not https://ecfr.eu/publication/peace-versus-justice-the-coming-european-split-over-the-war-in-ukraine/. I wonder if there's similarly reliable, granular data about the US (going beyond trick questions like "do you support Ukraine's independence or are you just a despicable human being")
Here's a Newsweek article about a pair of Pew polls:
https://www.newsweek.com/americans-strong-support-ukraine-aid-slipping-polls-suggest-1706361
The article is about a decline in support, but even after the decline people who think we aren't doing enough easily outnumber those who think we're doing too much.
My understanding was that the point of sanctions wasn't to cause regime change, but to hobble a regime's offensive power - which, arguably, they have done quite well against Russia. If true, then this would be good reason to end the sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela - neither of those seem like they're going to be launching major invasions of their neighbors - and keep or expand them against Russia, which demonstrably *is*.
An alternative theory that I find more convincing is from "Special Providence" that argues for thinking about US Foreign Policy as having 4 competing goals (promoting American Capitalism, promoting values, security at home, minimal cost). Presidents have some flexibility in foreign policy but they are still subject to voters and and so are usually seeking a short term balance between those objectives, ignoring long term tradeoffs.
"the fall of the Soviet Union has not seen any withdrawal as promised to Gorbachev"
This is heavily disputed and there is no evidence that it's true:
1. Gorbachev later repeatedly denied that NATO had made any promises about expansion. He's said contradictory things on the subject, including "The topic of 'NATO expansion' was never discussed; it was not raised in those years. I am saying this with a full sense of responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country brought up the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact had ceased to exist in 1991," he told the newspaper Kommersant in October 2014.
2. Countries mostly don't do major policy stances via secret backroom wink-wink deals with each other. They generally sign treaties, and even if it doesn't rise to that level they at least make a public statement? A he said-she said story that NATO off the record agreed not to expand seems unlikely
The US 'refus[ed] to take NATO membership for Ukraine off the table'
NATO expansion requires the unanimous agreement of all NATO countries, which was never going to happen with Ukraine (as we're seeing now with Sweden and Finland). So this is a (probably bad faith) red herring that gets repeated a lot
Promises were made to the leader of the USSR. Not to the Russian Federation, and nothing binding future western leader to make them refuse to admit new members. James Baker never said the US under George Bush's son wouldn't let the Baltics join NATO, over 10 years later when the USSR ceased to exist at the its successor state would run by a little known KGB official stationed east Germany. Invading a state over verbal agreements made before your own troops were even born is a sorry excuse for a casus belli.
Also German chancellor Shultz literally said he would veto Ukrainian membership in February, and Zelenskyy (who won election based on putting Ukraine on good terms with Russia) even said Ukraine wouldn't insisted on NATO membership in March. Either Putin doesn't care about NATO membership or doesn't think Germany and Ukraine aren't in a position to make such promises, no doubt due to some sense of chauvinism; imagine basing national security on the promises of a US crypto-colony ( to used a common Russian nationalistic phrase) or a fake nation that should really be part of Russia.
Peter Ziehan's geographic-centric argument is better. Russia was going to attempt to seize Ukraine, because rulers of Russia have done so for centuries due to the lack of defensible geography to the west of Moscow, necessitating the need to assert hegemony as far as possible or until you hit geographically defensible point (the Carpathian mountains). Putin is no different from Catherine the Great or Lenin. Russia's demographic time bomb meant this was Putin's last chance.
Disputed nonbinding, nonpublic promises supposedly made to a previous state that fragmented into parts after it has failed have very different status to say
> if Johnson had turned around a year or two later and put missiles in Turkey anyway
which was made recently, to the same organization and had valid reasons to be not made public.
Grievances alone don't mean much. Not being able to subjugate eastern Europe is a grievance for Russian nationalists, should that be honoured at the expense of Estonia or Polish nationalists?
In any case, informal is the key word here. An informal arrangements/understanding with individual leaders are agreements made to leaders not institutions themselves. Successive leaders have no obligation to retain informal arrangements made by their predecessors, especially as time marches on.
Documents disclosed after the cold war showed that these "promises", made to Yeltsin were often just assurances that western leaders at the time were not interested in NATO expansion. Different western leaders emerged who were.
Modernity is run on the basis of formal documents made with or between bureaucratic institutions, between people perpetuated to successors on the basis of vague assumptions. Something the west would have thought people who grew in a modernity obsessed USSR, would have known.
2+4 occurred before the end of USSR and the Warsaw pact so, when it was ludicrous to even contemplate the possibility of Poland joining NATO never mind Estonia.
I'm saying informal agreements are not a sustainable way of conduct IR, especially in the modern world. If the Kremlin believed that informal agreements were enough to prevent its former colonies joining NATO, in the long term, after numerous changes in western and soviet leaders it is their fault. They should have sought formal and clear terms, with a specific time period.
To be clear, you are saying that the "promises" meant they NATO could not let Czechia or Latvia join indefinitely? Would the Russian Federation have a legitimate grievance if Czechia joined NATO in 2100 or 5 billion years from now before the sun explodes moments before the sun explodes?
Russian Federation has also made plenty of promises, including to (as a member of the UN and signature to its charter) seek to settle international disputes by other means than warfare and in general, not wage war unless approved to do so by UNSC. Despite these holy signed treaties, most of its neighbors maintain some military forces and practice against repelling a Russian invasion, because they are not stupid.
Part of diplomacy is not to be stupid, and understand when the states make serious promises and when they do not and the parameters they are contingent on. For example, talks relating to German unification in 1990 were made with assumption on the both sides that the USSR would remain as a power to be reckoned with. To everyone's surprise, it kept imploding in 1991 and in even more spectacular fashion than previously.
Binding treaties like ABM treaty could still be withdrawn from; having "no NATO expansion" in proper treaty format would ultimately make no difference as deterrent that made it impossible to think about was removed.
Treaties are generally preferred over unofficial verbal agreements for a number of reasons. For one their is a clearer understanding of what parties have signed up for, breaking said agreements are well publicised and they aren't dependent on certain people being in power.
What decision to expand NATO into former Warsaw Pact/Baltics (and then Ukraine/Georgia) entailed was well-understood at the time (at least enough that people can point out to 1990s articles being "prophetic" today). Including Russians potentially never living that down.
It was the same assessment under Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin. Those that considered risk of escalation acceptable or ignorable enough to proceed (even after 2008 and 2014) won.
Czechia, Poland, and the Baltics joined despite the Russian federation making some fuss with nothing coming it. After all why would Putin want to get into a spat with NATO whilst making money hand over fist selling oil and gas western Europe, and sheltering the profits in the London property market? Many NATO nations were more than willing to act as his appeasers.
This view also ignores why ex-Warsaw pact states wanted to join NATO/ align themselves with the west. The decisions made by the Kremlin have systematically pushed eastern Europe into NATOs arms. Putin's invasion of Georgia, convinced Poland to let the US put missile defence systems in their land. Putin telling Yanukovych to back out of an EU trade and annexing Crimea in 2014 and war in the Donbas crushed pro-Russian sentiment in Ukraine and brought it closer into US alignment and made NATO membership more popular. Now Putin's invasion Ukraine has made Poland express an interest in stationing US nukes, and got Finland and Sweden applying for NATO membership.
Much like how the blowback of the war on terror produced more and more terrorists, the Kremlin has been the biggest force pushing eastern Europe into the west's arms.
The name of the German chancellor is "Olaf Scholz". Otherwise great comment.
When your "concerns" are the fundamental sovereignty of other countries and the rules of an international body you are not part of, then its entirely reasonable not to engage with you seriously as there is no prospect for change
Putin claims that the U.S. made Russia a promise not to expand NATO and then expanded NATO. Now he demands that the U.S. make the same promise again! If I believed him, I'd think he was pretty dumb.
This is an odd book. I have repeatedly argued that realist analysis of foreign policy is the beginning of the discussion not the end, and that foreign policy is always heavily driven by domestic political constraints. "If you fuck up the foreign politics, something bad might happen, like losing a war. but if you fuck up the domestic, something absolutely disastrous happens, you lose an election! And if that happens, it doesn't matter how genius your foreign policy is, you don't get to make it because you're no longer in charge."
that said, a lot of the arguments it seems to be making are bad. the principal driver of american adventurism abroad is not lockheed martin lobbyists. they don't care what the planes are for as long as they're bought and, if anything, they prefer not to have the boat rocked. the main driver is the american people's messianic vision of the world and our conviction that we know the true path for the good life. Americans get the moralistic foreign policy they ask for, good and hard, and the idea that you can change that by tweaking FARA is... frankly laughable.
yes, but nothing is more annoying than someone arguing your case badly. Defense contractors don't push wars, wars are disruptive. Oshkosh is a major defense contractor now because the iraq war created huge demand for MRAPS and entered into a field that general dynamics would have much prefered they stay out of.
Defense contractors are profit-maximizing, so:
An increasing defense budget is good, all other things being equal.
An increase in their share of the defense budget is good, all other things being equal.
A sudden change to the needs of the military is bad, all other things being equal, since it introduces real competition that could cause a competitor to overtake them.
This neatly explains why the defense industry funds hawkish think-tanks. Hawkish think-tanks protect the same of the defense budget from dovish think-tanks who keep prattling on about "spending America's peace dividend" on <insert cause here>
Any military material spending by US (be that war or "sending weapons to Ukraine") also means new orders to defence contractors to "replenish the stock" (and potentially more international orders if weapons performed well).
Libya for example expended large part of NATO missile inventory that had to be rebuilt over many years.
>they don't care what the planes are for as long as they're bought
The planes are for war. If we don't fight any wars, people might start asking why our military needs to be so big.
why would they? they don't ask that question about any other sort of government spending, most of which grows a lot faster than military spending does.
No, we do, we just get shot down by the entrenched interests in those fields.
Same as the peace doves get shot down when they try to shrink the military.
Yep, you are right
I can see there are interesting anecdotes in this book, but I don't see a useful theory. The review's claims for the theory are either too vague to be useful, or are easily disproven.
For example, if Ukraine and Taiwan policy were heavily influenced by weapons manufacturers, we'd see a strong bias toward sending those countries the biggest-ticket equipment we can. Yet Obama and Biden have held back from sending expensive Patriot missiles or modern jets to Ukraine, and the USA has started turning down Taiwan's requests for big flashy tanks and jets in favor of more practical anti-invasion equipment.
Now, maybe the book is more reasonable than the review. But if there's a testable statistical prediction the book makes about weapons manufacturers' impact on foreign policy, this review doesn't tell me. "Sometimes you'll see a bias toward weapons sales" is probably true, and fine as anecdotes. But it's not solid enough to make predictions with.
Same for the author's quotes about Russia invading Ukraine. If the west's distinctive provocation was restricted to NATO, why did Russia also invade Ukraine in 2014? But if the western stupidity is that Russia had a more general pseudo-imperial authority over Ukraine, why does the review complain so much about America's own pseudo-imperial behavior?
Again, I expect the book is more coherent than the review. But it doesn't speak well of the book's theory that the reviewer isn't able to be consistent in handling Ukraine with that theory.
A book of complaints about American foreign policy lies and errors is useful, the same as a doctor taking a detailed history of a particular patient is useful. But it's not the same as a meaningfully predictive theory of how countries in general make their foreign policy.
I'm looking forward to such a theory, better than "realism" or "grand strategy", and the book that gives it to me. I don't think it's this one.
The reviewer talks about the theory as deserving to seriously displace existing concepts like realism and grand strategy. That's great! I'm not super fond of either existing model.
I just don't see what this theory predicts more reliably than those two, that's big enough to care about. Where are the new theory predictions that are both significant and falsifiable?
"Foreign policy is affected by what's popular with voters and special interests; Ukraine's popularity isn't coincidental to the war" is a significant claim. But the claim is so vague that it isn't falsifiable enough to use for predictions.
"Weapons manufacturers will lobby to sell weapons, and changes in lobbying can explain 5% of changes in American military aid to countries" would be falsifiable. But that's not really significant on the scale of displacing "realism" or "grand strategy."
What claims do you read the theory as making that are both significant and falsifiable?
Or we could read the review as not making major claims for the theory - but then the theory wouldn't be very useful.
Hm. I guess my take is that I know what "realism" and "grand strategy" tell me to expect in wars, that I couldn't expect from formal agreements or intuitions of honor/morality alone.
By comparison, this "public choice theory" doesn't seem to be as specific in its predictions, except "governments avoid foreign policy moves that will be broadly condemned by their voters or interest groups." That seems true, but not impressive.
Is there a public-choice insight for foreign policy that you've been getting off this review, or the author's work, that you personally find impressive or interesting?
"Base venality" - if that means "fighting starts where there's money to be made, and not if there's not," that doesn't seem to accord with American intervening in impoverished Somalia or Kosovo, nor with America _not_ sending troops to the resource-rich Congo during its terrible war or to oil-rich nearby Venezuela.
Or if "venality" means "in any war, there will be people looking to bend policy in ways that boost their paycheck," that's surely true. But it doesn't distinguish war from any other government crisis responsibility.
Likewise, if "widespread ignorance" means that war policy involves a frightening degree of trust in not-so-expert designated "experts," that's again surely true but also true of pandemic policy (CDC and FDA failures), or central bank policy in 2008-2010, or any famous nuclear reactor accident.
"War, like any crisis, is full of underexamined slogans, hucksters hoping to sell their cause or product, and shameless blunders by alleged experts": a good caution for idealists, more than a big insight.
You seem to have noticed something beyond that, though.
Is there something distinctive to war that you think this book correctly tells us to watch out for?
> predictions that are both significant and falsifiable? [Of Public Choice vs realpolitik/unitary state theory]
Significant but perhaps not falsifiable:-
1. The USA will conduct reactive military adventurist operations in preference to strengthening multilateral international organisations to preserve world order (which latter approach is less costly to the state as a whole).
2. The USA's foreign policy will be volatile, changing in reaction to events elsewhere and especially in reaction to major domestic events. (There is no persistent unitary state consistently pursuing its interests.)
3. The USA's foreign policy discourse will be framed in military terms rather than policing and rehabilitation terms ("enemy" rather than "lawbreaker"). There must be at least one "enemy" made to seem a real and present danger. (For a while the big bads were Iran and/or North Korea, which would be ridiculous if it weren't so pathetic.)
OK, that's off the top of my head. With a week or two's thought I might come up with tests. Not going to get that, though.
> This claim is made nowhere in the review
It seems like a natural extension of PCT, no? Also, the claim that arms manufacturers don't have any interest in how their weapons are used is weak. There are obviously second order consequences here that will affect their bottom line.
I'm not sure how much of a problem this poses for the book on a theoretical level, but I was just struck by this phrase in the review:
"The West cannot rely on sanctions to make Russia abandon its core national security interests, which at the very least include..."
But if public choice theory defines how the USA's foreign policy decisions are made, it presumably defines how Russia carries out its foreign policy, too.
And I know the book doesn't include Ukraine, so this must be the reviewer's own thought:
"Western response [to the Ukraine war] is driven by extreme public outcry to an unprecedented extent"
I think "public outcry" is just another way of reifying some kind of national interest, isn't it? I don't think you can include "the public" in a public choice analysis.
But overall I like the review and the idea. Hanania's argument is like a fully-evolved species of "never ascribe to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence," which makes a lot of sense.
They're not competent at foreign policy, is the point. Hanania seems to me to be arguing that countries are not competent at foreign policy because there simply are no institutions that properly coordinate their efforts. Hence when countries do very horrible foreign policy, like starting wars, it's not because the country is horrible; it's because it's incompetent.
I'd argue the west can rely on sanctions to make Russia (or rather Putin and his inner circle of state sec elites) "abandon its core national security interests", by making it unable to successfully wage war.
Iraq post operation desert storm.
I never said they weren't horrific. Only that it made Saddam less able to invade another country again.
It prevented another invasion by Iraq of a neighbour.
WWI, WWII (Germany), WWII (Japan). Note that this doesn't stop them from unsucessfully waging war e.g. by overextending towards oilfields.
What makes you think the Kaiser could have been invaded if he had access to Canadian wheat or Hitler had access to US oil?
Also with regards to the current war, Russia is heavily dependent on western imports of components parts and capital goods. Without those it is only a matter of time before it can no longer wage large scale modern war of territorial conquest.
> But if public choice theory defines how the USA's foreign policy decisions are made, it presumably defines how Russia carries out its foreign policy, too.
Public choice theory only applies to democracies or states with diverse political interest groups. Centralized states where power is concentrated into individuals (or groups/institutions) who primarily or exclusively care about their state's long-term security and power, will presumably tend to act closer to a unitary actor model.
I think this misunderstands a bit how "centralized states" work; and how public choice is functioning in this example.
The classic way of looking at public choice is looking at who gets paid, with explicit flows of money through the state to certain state actors. But in these foreign policy cases, it doesn't seem to be much like that. In the case of Bush and Iraq, for example, Bush seems to have been committed to invading Iraq; but so far as I know, he didn't make any money off it. I assume he got paid in buddy-buddy-ideology coins at cocktail parties. (This might mean that we really need to use a different theory instead of public choice. I take Hanania's most important point to be just this: stop analysing foreign policy at the level of the state, that's the wrong level. Public choice was a decent theory to hang this argument on, even if it's later superseded by more advanced non-state-level theories.)
In the case of more autocratic countries, I don't think they have anything like the kind of unity or consistency that you seemed to be suggesting. They too have their ideologies and factions. The lack of rule of law means that clear, well-documented flows of money to licenced lobbyists don't really appear, which stymies traditional PCT analysis, but they're still full of different groups competing over financial, physical, and reputational resources.
An example would be China: the whole world is thinking about whether China will launch a military action against Taiwan, and most commentators seem to think it basically hinges on the relative balance of power between a bunch of hawkish military types and the rest of the establishment. If factional jockeying gives the military types the upper hand at any moment, it could all kick off. This sounds to me exactly like what Hanania is getting at: maybe not classic PCT, but everyone agrees that the right level to be looking at when you're trying to understand this particular military (in)action is not the level of the state, but the interplay of factions within it.
> An example would be China: the whole world is thinking about whether China will launch a military action against Taiwan, and most commentators seem to think it basically hinges on the relative balance of power between a bunch of hawkish military types and the rest of the establishment.
This is the exact opposite of what's going on in public choice theory! The hawks and the rest of the establishment *all care* about whether they invade Taiwan or not. In America, only a small group of people care about American sanctions on Cuba, and they all care in one direction, so even though the policy is clearly very stupid and ineffective, it continues.
I suppose there may be some Chinese guys who really care a lot about, say, Botswana, and therefore exercise much more influence in the Party on the subject of Botswana because nobody else cares. But given the country's relative weakness compared to the USA, these kinds of parochial decision-making processes will probably amount to "and China today signed a historical trade agreement with Botswana" or "and China today decided to stop exporting goods to Botswana because they said the word 'Republic of Taiwan'." (Which actually does call to mind the recent matters with Lithuania and Taiwan. Perhaps some faction of the CCP really cares about the slight, and the rest doesn't care about Lithuania, as it's an irrelevant country to the PRC, so you get the extreme response.)
I'm not certain that I understand what you're saying there. I disagree with some of it - I don't think all or most of the establishment really cares about Taiwan.
That balance I was talking about would be something akin to the balance between the "invade Iraq" clique in the US government and the rest of the establishment, who generally didn't care much about Iraq, but think war in general is a bad thing.
In China, it's a similar balance around a different balance point. Everyone seems to agree that Taiwan is a part of China (in some mysterious metaphysical way) - that's the baseline, and doesn't seem to imply much in the way of action. Some hardliners want to invade Taiwan; the rest of the establishment thinks war in general is a bad thing.
I dunno, though! I'm not hugely well-informed on this, and am only offering a best guess.
> The West cannot rely on sanctions
Fortunately we are not total idiots and this time it is not a sole solution and we are also - for example - supplying (some, not enough) weapons to Ukraine to protect our core national security interests.
And do other things.
Russia losing or at least being ground down in Ukraine substantially reduces risks of Russia invading NATO member which would require:
- starting direct war USA vs Russia with high risk of escalation to nuclear war or USA losing it
- effectively dismantling NATO which would discredit USA foreign policy and alliances
both would be catastrophic for USA.
(yes, Russia invading NATO member would be monumentally stupid and idiotic and unprecedented and not worth it - the same things were supposed to ensure that Russia will not fully invade Ukraine)
> Ukraine would sue for peace post-haste
Or to be more exact, it would be fully take over by Russia which would noticeably increase Russian power (yes, their equipment is mostly outdated and country poor, stll it would boost Russia).
Such nonresponse would also very likely increase risk of Putin taking extremely dumb risks like invading Estonia.
In short, I worry that it would be equivalent to what was done with Czechoslovakia before WW II.
And Russian occupation of Ukraine would be likely pretty bad.
> Also could have done a lot to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine after war broke out
That would have greater chance if Russian demands would not be utterly insane and clearly only token ones as they really wanted their war.
> Clearly, our strategy in Ukraine is making a Russia-NATO war much more likely than it would be in a vacuum.
What would be alternative? Surrender Ukraine to Russia, ignore all problems and hope that Putin will not continue?
Do you seriously believe that the end result is still likely to be the same as it would have been if Ukraine capitulated ~immediately? That seems very doubtful to me- Russia's initial objectives pretty clearly included regime change and replacement with a pro-Russian government, which no longer seems at all likely.
Maintaining the "nobody invades anybody (except sometimes us)" status quo is a core national security interest for America.
"They {Russians} have made clear, openly and consistently, that they do not want NATO to keep expanding".
Upon coming to power Zelenskyy ruled out NATO membership and tried to diffused tensions with Russia. German Chancellor Sholtz ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine, which he can do given his veto on new membership. If this was about NATO expansion, Putin didn't have to worry, right? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/02/15/russia-ukraine-crisis-putin-nato-boris-johnson-invasion-news/
Obviously Putin thought America ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine was so the most important thing. If his sovereign and colony speech tell us anything is that he doesn't believes those two states are anything other than US puppets, especially with Ukraine. Whether the "Little Russians" do something counter to the interest of the "Great Russians", especially assert nationalism, that is product of meddlesome outsiders; the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, the Habsburg empire, the Kulaks in conjunction with newly created Polish state, and now "drug addicted neo-Nazis" in alignment with the US.
The cause of this war is more likely to be Russian colonialist mentality. The Kremlin doesn't consider Ukrainians to be worth negotiating with. It's kind of an extreme version of how the UK is dealing with the Northern Irish protocol.
A rather insightful Russian commentator I follow would agree with you, and would in fact go further and state that one of Russia's most powerful military weapons is their ability to spin narratives. In his words:
"When a Russian is on TV and his lips are moving, he is carrying out a combat operation".
The NATO angle was picked because the Kremlin believed it was an ideal fracture point to use to try and prevent support for Ukraine from solidifying, and it has been partially successful.
Putin wanted a guarantee that Ukraine would *never* join NATO, which NATO was not willing to give, and in fact explicitly ruled out. Sholtz may have opposed Ukraine's accession to NATO, but Sholtz will not be German Chancellor forever. Russia wanted a guarantee it could rely on even if the situation changed in a way that reduced its leverage over NATO's decisions.
German chancellors generally do last forever (by the standards of politics).
This comment strikes me as an example of the modern western bias to look at things in a very short time span. The amount of times I hear people in the news describe something as "unprecedented" when precedents are easily found (often even within living memory, but back 50,60 years.) Alarms me.
Merkel was only Chancellor for what, 2, 3 decades? That's a short time in history.
Similarly, some people say things like "The damage to Russia's econmy outweighs any benefit they get from conquering Ukraine." and that might be true for 2 or 3 decades, but eventually, the extra population, tax income and land will even it out and turn it into a profitable decision.
The "Last ten years is all of history" seems to be the "Standards of politics" and that really needs to change.
Not a substantive comment but if this is supposed to be anonymous, there appears to be a link to one of the author’s other reviews in section 7 that should probably be removed till identities are revealed.
I was just about to say the same thing! Not anonymous.
I clicked on the link too. Bye bye anonymity.
> the model still falls short in accounting for the oligarchs who run the mafia state
The oligarchs don't run the mafia state, though, and haven't since at least 2003 when Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested *pour encourager les autres*.
> We know what the Russians want. They have made clear, openly and consistently, that they do not want NATO to keep expanding.
There are two claims here. The first claim is that the Russians want this specific thing (as opposed to, say, annexing territory). The second claim is that "we" (the US? the blogosphere? the rationalists?) are in broad agreement that this is true.
Both of these claims seem pretty false to me and I was surprised to see them asserted without evidence.
In particular I'm having a hard time understanding the Russian objection to NATO expanding. If the whole point of NATO is preventing Russia from conquering Europe, then it's hard to hear "we don't like NATO" as anything other than "we don't like things that prevent us from conquering Europe".
NATO has been involved in foreign interventions, e.g. Yugoslavia, which were not purely defensive, and has always been perceived by the Soviet and Russian elite as representing a security threat basically forever. The Warsaw Pact (also a collective defense agreement) was formed in response to NATO expansion.
It is, realistically, unlikely that a NATO that expanded to include every country bordering Russia would just invade Russia. But it is equally unrealistic that a Warsaw Pact that expanded to include Canada, Mexico, and Cuba would just invade the USA, yet it would be ridiculous to say the only reason that the USA might be concerned about such a thing is its own desire to invade Canada, Mexico, and Cuba.
(I think both that Russia does not want NATO to keep expanding, but also the current war is not really about NATO expansion, as Ukraine was at no risk of joining NATO any time soon.)
> The Warsaw Pact (also a collective defense agreement)
Nope, that was tool of imperialistic Russian policy. Note who was invaded by that Russian organization: countries belonging to it that tried to stop being controlled by USSR.
> The multi-national Communist armed forces' sole joint action was the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Pact
I was also repeatedly used as threat in Poland by regime as explanation why they are oppressing people (otherwise Soviets will fully invade and things will be even worse), presumably also in other countries.
Say what you want about NATO, but at least it has not jointly invaded one of its members for defying USA.
NATO isn't a defensive organization either, if you define "collective defense" solely counting if it's actually triggered. NATO has never defended a member state. Glancing at Wikipedia, it has been involved in: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Gulf of Aden, and Libya, none of which were attacking NATO members (maybe you could generously count Afghanistan, though of course as this very article notes, 9/11 was done by non-state actors who the Taliban were perfectly willing to sacrifice).
I mean, really. Do you think that if West German troops had invaded East Germany, the Warsaw Pact *wouldn't* have moved to defend them?
I have no problem with admitting that describing NATO as "purely defensive" would be lying/untrue/misleading.
But Russian organization went further: its sole action was invasion of own member. It is not merely doing things in addition to being defensive pact: it was aggressor to member of own defensive pact.
A) The primary function of collective defense organizations is preventing there from being a war in the first place, so when they work, nobody notices them doing anything; and
B) No matter how evil the Warsaw Pact was to its member states, that is not why the USA would not like to be surrounded by Warsaw Pact states (or why Russia does not want to be surrounded by NATO states), so this kvetching feels pointless.
Putin had said among other things that he sees NATO activity in Ukraine pre-dating invasion as basically NATO expansion without formal membership. "They just renamed NATO bases into 'NATO missions'".
Ukraine taking all the risks with none of the benefits.
Firstly, kudos on setting an ambitious goal; reviewing a non-popsci textbook on a known-to-be-Gordian mess of complex nuance is inherently pretty difficult. I feel like you did a fair job of translating an incredibly dry and niche book into a moderately high-ABV% distilled review. Not the easiest grapes to make wine from.
That being said...wow, a whole barrage of [definitional citation links] and (parenthetical explanations) in the introduction, followed by mostly a dearth of same in the main body, and then proliferating once more in the conclusion. I'm sympathetic, understanding academia frequently requires a certain amount of background comprehension. But I'm not gonna read 7 other Nature Valley(tm) granola bar-esque Wikipedia articles (dense and dry, huge mess of supporting citation crumbs) as preparation for better understanding a mere book review on a blog, sorry. This feels like a case where adding a bit of extra length to expound on tl;dr foundational concepts would help a lot; several other reviews did this. (And yes, I concede this failing to Do The Homework possibly invalidates most of my criticisms.)
Along that same line, I'd have liked to see more citations or direct book quotes in the main body. (Hard to tell from formatting which parts you're referencing from book itself; the fusion review did the same thing.) There's a certain narrative being told, and it sounds plausible enough...but is it true? I don't know, and am not sure how to judge the evidence. You do candidly admit IR is a super-subjective and hard to empiricize field, which is appreciated. At the same time, "it’s difficult to know who possesses genuine expertise" applies here! What particular cause do I have to trust the experts cited for the PCT model over IR normies? And are they right by coincidence, e.g. past IR data can be massaged to fit the PCT regression line better than the UA one, even if the underlying "math" doesn't hold up? My priors against orthodox social science narratives are fairly high, yet reversed bad science is not good science. I'm updating in the direction of "UA lacks explanatory power", at minimum; skeptical of much more.
Conversely, the section on sanctions did seem fairly compelling. I'm not old enough to have followed many of the less recent examples, but with Middle East, Venezuela, and Russian sanctions there's definitely been this weirdly optimistic vibe of "they'll call uncle any day now, surely the economy will motivate rational self-interest!" Which clearly hasn't panned out, and at least in the immediate conflict, feeling inflation's bite domestically really drives home the immediate collatoral damage of sanctions. Convincing arguments for sanctions not even being applied in a plausibly deterrent way, too, so even if they "worked" we'd never know it. Given the disputed-at-best track record, further waiting for Any Day Now seems self-flagellatory, if not outright perverse. Better carrotsticks are needed. (I notice that this is the only section full of empirical quantification, which is maybe why I'm more persuaded.)
Finally, the blue and yellow elephant in the room:
>and conquest has disappeared from international society i.e. selection pressure does not exist.
Immediately upon reading that line, I was like "uh, yeah, about that..." It would have been a huge oversight not to include the later section on Ukraine, so I'm very glad you did. This also easily makes the case for Book Is Relevant, of course, so on that grounds alone it's a key section. I have a couple quibbles though.
Firstly, with all due respect to Mr. Hanania (thanks for commenting, by the way! this isn't personal!), I was under the impression that his reputation among the Ratsphere had taken a bit of a swan dive recently, specifically in regards to Ukraine war writings (and possibly covid?). He's not a writer I've perused much, so I didn't have any particular priors; but seeing a lot of other community members whom I respect say that Hanania Used To Be Great, But Now #smh, I did revise downwards some. Unclear how book should be interpreted in this regard. OTOH, the endorsements by Lord Byren Caplan, TC, etc. are encouraging. Mixed Bag here.
Secondly, I notice that Hanania's suggested ideas for norm changes are:
1. Fix the press
2. Fix the press
3. Fix the press
4. Fix the press
...but this doesn't seem to follow from earlier. Didn't I just read that "the cost of educating oneself about foreign policy outweighs any benefit an[sic] one can expect to gain as individual citizens cannot affect foreign policy", plus collective action problem; and "the public is ignorant of foreign affairs, so those who control the flow of information have excess influence"? Maybe I'm missing the causal chain, but I'm unclear on how improved media reporting which the public won't read anyway will improve things. There's no guarantee that the media itself won't become one of those controllers of IR information flow with excess influence. (In fact, many would say it already does that, in very-not-neutral ways. MSM Delenda Est.) At minimum this would require Mambo Policy Change #5 to be feasible; given the hysterical establishment reactions to Snowden, Manning, Assange, etc. I am left less than hopeful.
Furthermore, it seems contradicted by the later musings on the hyperreal powers of Twitter outrage. That section seems to invite the argument that:
1. By PCT, politics is the ultimate driver of foreign policy.
2. Politics is downstream of culture.
3. Therefore, culture is the ultimate driver of foreign policy.
Now, I suppose one could very charitably classify Twitter under the umbrella of "the press". But that seems like a reach, and anyway, who's going to reform Twitter in support of better IR, Elon Musk? Do we even want to "feed the beast" and further entrench Twitter's hegemony on modern discourse? Pretty sure an entire other book review recently made the case that this is a Really Bad Idea. I'm left confused whether the befuddled public is powerless to affect IR, or a super-engaged Awareness Raised public actually controls the IR levers after all.
However, I do agree Ukraine Twitter seems to follow the Bad Thing Happened -> We Must Do Something -> This Is Something failure mode, with attendant policy disasters. In this sense, it's indeed supportive of the PCT-IR model. Now one just needs to go back to all the pre-Twitter wars and demonstrate the same pattern, and I'm totally sold on that hypothesis.
Overall, intriguing but kinda frustrating. Share other commentors' hope that the book itself fills in many of these potholes. One hardly needs to make the case that American IR is in dire need of a higher sanity waterline. Not just for the greater good of the rest of the world, but because such unequivocally shameful blunders are a huge part of why the left has given up on patriotism, to their electoral detriment: https://www.slowboring.com/p/hungarian-nationalism-is-not-the . Like charity, self-esteem begins at home, and I'm tired of being ashamed of my nationality.
> high-ABV% distilled review.
Good turn of phrase.
Typo: "Librya" (should be Libya) is one of the examples of part 3.
I don't understand how typos like this happen. (I don't mean to pick on this author; I see them elsewhere as well.) When I type on my computer, in almost every context, misspellings get a red underline. It doesn't catch every mistake (e.g., using the wrong word), but it catches things like Librya that aren't words at all.
Some people are not using or ignoring spellchecker.
Well, it looks like this person plagiarized parts of this essay (in at least one case; more unconfirmed). Could be a spelling mistake lifted from a more informal text.
There is another purpose of sanctions that I have not seen mentioned here:
Countries with smaller economies are less effective at waging war. Destroying a country's economy makes it less capable of sustaining the wars it is currently fighting and less capable of winning wars in the future.
This is especially relevant to the current sanctions against Russia. The sanctions on Russian (oil & gas) exports have been weak, so Russia still has cash. But the sanctions on Russian imports have been much stronger. Russia has a large military industrial complex and is a major weapons producer and exporter, but its supply chains are very entangled with Europe. When Europe & the US restrict Russian imports, including threatening third party importers with sanctions, Russia's industry doesn't have the parts to produce lots of things ... including tanks. [1] Maybe Russia will learn to make these parts themselves, but Russia doesn't seem to have enough expertise in some fields, especially electronics. If Russia can't produce new tanks to replace the ones destroyed in battle, it will have a harder time maintaining the war.
[1] https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/russia-ukraine-crisis/russia-using-scrap-metal-from-dishwashers-refrigerators-in-military-hardware-us-articleshow.html
And for obvious reasons neither NATO nor EU nor Estonia wants to risk nuclear war over Russian invasion in Estonia, so best way to solve this is to make Russians unable to invade.
(even better would be having Russia making credible commitment to not invading but it is not possible right now)
"the opponents of interventionists may never be able to muster evidence clear enough to win against those in power with special interests backing."
(Pause for Assange.)
It seems a caricature of mainstream International Relations theory to say its dependent on the unitary actor model, since even the very introductory stuff I've done presents it as some model among many and warns that it's a simplification
Seems to be a general thing in these kind of books where you set up a opposing position of an uncritical majority you can valiantly push back on
I fully agree. Hanania attacks a strawman here, and not even an interesting one.
Also, I am extremely reminded of Tetlock's concept of a hedgehog: Hanania seems to have a single model of foreign policy (that is determined by the interest group which profit most), and tries to explain everything with this world model.
The model is not completely false (but not new either!). Sometimes it's true and gives useful insights. But sometimes not. The problem is that Hanania tries to fit everything into this single model, and often it does not fit. The right thing would be to use this model along with five others, all of which are sometimes useful. But with this exclusionary perspective, the book is mediocre at best.
After reading some of Hanania's own work, I think the reviewer misses the author's real insight about foreign policy.
In Hanania's telling, the overwhelming flaw in foreign policy is inertia.
Geographic inertia: We tag particular countries or regions as "national interests," and then send troops or deploy sanctions obsessively to the same places sixty years later, while neglecting objectively more important parts of the world. We hate atrocities in Kosovo? Great! What about 100x bigger atrocities in the Congo? Oil is a key resource? Sure, but what about lithium? It's not that we have no excuses for our interests; it's that we hardly ever update them to changed reality.
Alliance inertia: we decided the Taliban was The 100% Enemy and the Kabul government The 100% Good Guys, and so tied our hands for twenty years against any new arrangements or any real leverage for peace, no matter how corrupt they became in Kabul or how negotiable some Taliban allegiances might be. In the same way we "picked our side" in Iraq and created a Sunni insurgency that didn't have to happen; in the same way we still throw away compromise deals that don't "defeat" Iran, even when they're hardly more bloodthirsty in the region these days than Saudi Arabia. Why? Because Iran is "our enemy" - by the sacred definition of forty years of inertia.
Failure inertia: since you can always pay strangers to keep suffering for you, nobody ever admits an intervention failed when they can just keep fighting and let the next President handle it. Politically, who could blame them? Biden got roasted for withdrawing from Afghanistan, even when everybody saw staying wasn't achieving anything permanent for all the billions spent. So sanctions, interventions, and worst of all civil wars get prolonged, at horrible cost in lives and money, because no politician wants the hit from negotiating a sensible but "disappointing" compromise or exit.
Toolkit inertia: if we've used sanctions in one place, why not use them everywhere? If we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, why not send some troops to Syria and Libya? By a sort of circular "it's the conventional answer" reasoning, whatever we've done before is what we try to do again, even if stopped being effective two or eight interventions ago.
Domestic policy also has inertia, of course. But when it's domestic policy, voters can see for themselves the policy you're sticking with is dumb, because it hits their own lives. In foreign policy the people who tell voters about the policy results are often from the same building as the ones who made that policy. So the mistakes can go on and on.
I'm not seeing a big-picture theory, in what I've read so far, to displace realism or grand strategy. But Hanania makes a great point about foreign policy's curse of inertia.
Great points. I'd add "bureaucratic inertia", where (e.g.) anti-soviet hawks hired and trained the newer anti-soviet hawks (who became the anti-russian hawks) who hired and trained the newer anti-russian hawks. Also "journalistic inertia" -- the lack of imagination we see in running tired or reboots of old childrens' movies isn't restricted to the writers in Hollywood. The writers everywhere seem stuck in ruts that make everyone we don't like into baby-killing genocidal dictators who gas their own people.
> It’s difficult to see what threat the US is protecting against in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany.
it is easy: it is Russia. For example USAF Boeing KC-135R Stratotanker flying right now above eastern Poland has flown from airbase near Cambridge in UK.
Boeing E-8C flying right now above Romania has flown from Ramstein air base in Germany.
Drone flying above Black Sea (FORTE10 series missions by US) is based in Sicily.
It is not secret or classified info - see https://www.flightradar24.com/ and top tracked planes and ones in eastern flank of NATO. It was also obvious when the book was written and review discusses 2022 invasion so author should not be allowed to selectively hide info.
Not sure is it strategic incompetence and pro-Russia propaganda or being simply ignorant.
Hopefully "Russia is a threat and likely to start wars of aggression that will murder thousands of people" is now going to be treated seriously, at least for few years? And not dismissed as Poles being russophobes?
Exact locations are case of status quo bias and could be relocated closer to Russia since USSR fall, but maybe their position remains optimal given increased range of both airplanes and various missiles?
> Ukraine has won the meme war with utterly lopsided propaganda and unanimous international support on the Internet.
Author is completely wrong again, and USA/Europe centric. Russian propaganda was very successful in China, and achieved better effects in South America and Africa.
Please do not treat this article too seriously.
I just looked through quickly at random points and spotted that.
Either way, this article appears to be of a low value and spending time on dismantling other claims is better spend elsewhere.
Though I am curious is it evidence of Richard Hanania having this problems, reviewer, or both.
Agreed on these points definitely. My initial response to 'it's difficult to see what threat...' was also... Seriously? The author cannot be looking very hard then
Richard got a lot about Ukraine wrong, and I think Noah Smith dismantled him pretty thoroughly on Twitter.
Couple of thoughts from a European who did this kind of thing for a living all his life, and has seen how the US system works at first hand.
First, it's trivially true that nations are not unitary actors for anything, and certainly not in foreign policy. For one thing foreign policy is complicated, and it requires a compromise between all sorts of factors; political, military, economic, social, and of course the views and powers of local actors, and the question of what is actually feasible. Shifting coalitions within and outside government will support different agendas, and the country or region concerned may even have some influence! Saudi Arabia is a good example of intermingled and conflicting agendas for all western nations, not least the US.
But the US system is so massive, so complex, so conflictual and so sealed off from wider reality as to constitute a special case. Every part of the US government effectively has its own foreign policy, and it is therefore possible to stop or disable almost any initiative. There is very little opportunity for central direction or control, and most policies are exhausting compromises which reflect the balance of power in Washington. The State Department, for example, is only one actor in foreign policy, and the whole of the rest of the world is just a lobby group, often of not much importance. Interest groups can sabotage even agreed policies: the Pentagon didn't want to be in Bosnia in the 90s, and was lobbying US politicians and the media to overturn the policies of their own government.
This means that it's always dangerous to assume that anything you agree with the US will actually be implemented. Nobody in Washington is really in charge of anything or, if you prefer, everyone thinks they are. Countries who thought they had negotiated treaties with the US are often stunned to discover that they are never implemented because Congress doesn't like them, or some part of the US government stops the necessary laws coming into force. This is why the Russians have always dismissed the US as "non-agreement-capable", and why they have finally decided that negotiation is pointless, and all that matters is power, and facts on the ground. Some interpret all this as the US deliberately creating crises and instability, but I actually think the explanation lies precisely in the anarchy of policy-making (if you can call it that) in Washington. The other important consequence, as I suggested above, is that the US is isolated from the consequences of its actions, and never suffers from mistakes. There is an assumption of foreign policy autarky: it's true that western governments specifically didn't envisage any enlargement of NATO in the early 1990s (I was there), but, hey, times change, and anyway what can the Russians do about it anyway? This is about to change with Ukraine.
But the biggest influence on foreign policy is inertia, as I suggested in this article of a couple of weeks ago.
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-hinges-of-history-creak
Recent western policy over Ukraine, with its bluster, its pose of political and moral superiority and its open call, for years now, to replace the government of Russia with one more to its liking, is only explicable on the basis of a western economic, strategic and military power and superiority that no longer exist. But western ruling classes and their media and intellectual servants simply haven't adjusted to this new weakness. Sanctions were agreed on not because they were likely to be effective, but because they were what we always do, and anyway there was no choice. The West was unable to intervene militarily so sanctions, even self-defeating ones, even self-harming ones, were preferable to doing nothing. After all, something might turn up. In fact, as I argue in my most recent article, we are going to have to get used to the political and consequences of being a lot weaker.
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/after-the-cavalry-didnt-charge
Finally, it's wrong to neglect the ideological element, as theories of this sort tend to. Since the end of the Cold War, western states have been on a messianic drive to spread (neo)liberal ideas everywhere. The post-national, post-culture, post-language, post-history, post-identity, post-politics, neoliberal norms exemplified by the EU and the US have recently hit an obstruction, in the form of a powerful state where history, patriotism, language culture and history are still factors. That state must therefore be defeated so that neoliberal norms can triumph. I never thought I'd live to see this, but in Europe, certainly, the level of sheer blind hatred of the Russians among the PMC is terrible to behold. So no, foreign policy isn't made by defence manufacturers or lobby groups vying for power. Sometimes, it isn't rational at all.
Great comment. Subscribed to your Substack.
Thank you!
I'm grateful to you for interesting insights into how foreign policy works (or doesn't) in Washington, but the second half of your post is, to put it mildly, unpersuasive. Disclaimer: I am a naturalized American citizen and a member of the PMC that supposedly hates the poor Russians so.
When you imply that the West hates Russia because it's a country with strong "history, patriotism, language, culture," that sounds like a mirror image of Bush saying of the Middle East, "They hate us for our FREEDOMS!" I have nothing against Russia's history, patriotism, language or culture - I mean, other than the fact that the Red Army invaded my native country during WWII and then the Soviets f****d my country over for 40+ years, but, eh, bygones! I think Russian language is beautiful and Russian culture has given the world some amazing jewels, like Dostoevsky and Rachmaninov.
I have absolutely nothing against the Russian people. I do hate Putin, not because he presides over a country with a strong history and language and whatnot, but because he is a murderous, vile scumbag who has caused horrific atrocities in Ukraine. If someone had been living under a rock for the past eight years and then read your comment, they would conclude that there was absolutely no reason for the West to oppose Russia, other than the West's own evil imperialism. Putin? Never heard of him. Ukraine got invaded? What's that about?
TL;DR: That's some major revisionism you've got going there.
The problem is that "history, patriotism, language, and culture" are what _enables_ Putin to be sufficiently dangerous for you to care - and to act with relative impunity while holding firm belief he can weather anything West can throw at him.
And you cannot deprive him of this without destroying all from which his beliefs came from.
I'm describing what I observe to be a mentality which is widespread in Europe, although I don't necessarily share it. I'm not taking sides. The European PMC prides itself in being post-more-or-less everything. It's a bland, homogeneous group of people, educated at the same universities, eating at the same restaurants in Brussels, speaking mostly rather indifferent English and, critically, largely thinking the same thoughts. All their lives, they have seen their woolly ideology, a kind of triumphalist mixture of neoliberalism and social justice warfare, creeping eastward, in an apparently unstoppable process of ideological normalisation. It took over the former WP countries, it has advanced (as they see it) in Africa and the Middle East, and of course Ukraine was in many ways the crown jewel of the whole process, the Good Russia, the example of a political and business elite appearing to buy into the European supranational ideas. Russia, insofar as it was ever really considered, was just a bigger and later version of Ukraine. But it didn't work out like that, and what we're seeing is what we always see when any normative system hits the buffers.
> nationalism is strong enough to make states act like unitary actors
Wait, there are people that seriously believe that? And not just use it as an useful approximation?
Even many computer games choose to use more accurate models.
The Ukraine war shows another use for sanctions - denying resources to an enemy and reducing their ability to make war. Sanctions can do this directly, by blocking imports of machine tools, computer chips, and other essentials you need to build tanks and missiles, and also indirectly, by reducing the size of their economy and the amount of tax revenue they have to fund it.
I'm not sure this logic applies to all of the US's sanction targets, but there's good evidence it applies for Russia.
Were further citations removed from the review? Because there are a lot of extraordinary claims in it, and especially in the conclusions section I feel like some are not directly taken from the book either. I would like to fact check some of this before taking it at face value and without having to pay money for a potentially nonsense book. I guess it's a shame this book review provides no value in this case.
Is it even a book review? I have no idea at all is book itself worth reading.
Is it summary of book? Bunch of thoughts inspired by a book topic?
I think to anyone with a reasonable background of studying economic/public policy, none of these insights would feel particularly... Insightful. Public choice theory explains a lot of how govt behaves. My prior in any case was that the same would be true for how it behaves when it comes to foreign policy. Perhaps it is a paradigm shift for international relations? But I know very little about that field of study
Reading through this the first time, there was something strange that I couldn't quite put my finger on. But I think I've figured it out now.
Hanania criticizes US foreign policy for being an aristocracy. But what alternative does he present? "A monolithic agent capable of making rational decisions" who makes long term plans. This book is a criticism of the aristocratic US foreign policy establishment for not acting like an ideal monarchy.
Recognizing the monarchist worldview (at least for foreign policy) helps some of the weird things in the review fall into place. Why is there talk of the interests of the Gulf states or Russia, instead of applying the public choice model to them too? Why does the public appear as just another interest group that might influence the rational agent's designs?
Hanania's recommended legal reforms and norm changes seem unlikely to be effective. (He admits that they "are more or less impossible".) They're designed to weaken the aristocracy, but don't offer an alternative rational actor to make decisions instead. If they did, it would likely look like a philosopher-king.
There are two other similar books that I think would be more interesting: (1) Here's how aristocratic US foreign policy fails at the ideals of democracy. This would follow most people's intuitions about how government is supposed to work. (2) No actually, monarchies are better at foreign policy. Most people would not initially agree with him, but it would be interesting to see if he could make a good argument.
As for sanctions, I agree that they mostly don't work. The funny thing is that it appears that Russians themselves want the sanctions. Formally the government is against them of course, but the whole mood is that we can do without western imports and sanctions will only help us to reorient and strengthen our domestic industry.
It is complete madness however. I was comparing the current prices to those in the USSR during 1970s (relative to average salaries). Now food and services seem to be slightly cheaper than in the Soviet time but that can be easily explained by growing economy and raising incomes. The biggest difference is in manufactured (mostly western) goods which are now up to 50 times cheaper. It shows (another Bayesian data point) that even the Soviet manufacturing sector was very inefficient. Modern Russia has lost even that basis and without western imports it is a lost case. It is the hubris of the current leaders to think otherwise but let's not stop them in their self-destructive path.
The Soviet case shows that to achieve advanced manufacturing, central measures will not work. The government can help with tariffs, import rules etc. but we need honesty first and entrepreneurs who can be open and critical of everything. I think more about people like Elon Musk rather than Russian or Ukrainian oligarhs who mostly siphoned the value instead of creating it.
There is however Russian Yandex to match US Google - and nothing like that in EU. And "cheap western goods" rely in part on "cheap material and energy imports to West" (not only from Russia) - as we see with exploding Western inflation and energy prices.
The potential is there. Isolation isn't total. Knowledge and expertise necessary to build substitutes to revealed weak points exists; and sanctions provide political will to use it to that end rather then continue "business as usual".
However, Google is not some technology wonder. I don't even use it anymore, the default search in Edge (Microsoft Big) is fine. In fact, it is a tragedy that the smartest people in Silicon valley who could have developed new technologies are working on trivial things like how to better serve ads.
The popularity of youtube, twitter, facebook etc. are mostly due to the network effect not technological superiority.
I use Bing and Google on occasions and while Bing is "fine" as a search when you know exactly what you're looking for and willing to tweak query a bit Google is much better at "guessing what you needed from first query".
Russia seems to be a lot more advanced in "electronic government" access (with GosUslugi == GovServices providing most of functionality online) and electronic banking then most of Western world.
Most of "Western advantage" is institutional inertia rather then reality.
For example, for LNG Novatek did get Russian-produced LNG line. That obviously had some problems - real engineering rarely catches everything on planning stage. And it was previously easier to "just buy stuff that works" from West then work out all the kinks in manufacturing and operations to make it work. Now they don't have a choice and have to build up local expertise.
I personally never noticed google "guessing better". Probably google is optimized better for some people and Bing for other people.
Russia's better electronic banking? What are you talking about? As far as I can remember, up to very recently Russia didn't even had a national clearing system. Money transfers to one bank to another used SWIFT network and cost something like $20. Whereas the EU had developed IBAN system with unified account numbers and instant SEPA transfers, mostly free of charge which is clearly superior even to the US ACH system.
"Until very recently" - how recently exactly? Currently interbank transfers go through FPS; pretty much every Russian bank is connected at the moment.
From CBR site:
The Faster Payments System (FPS) is a service that lets individuals make instant (24/7) interbank transfers to themselves or other persons using a mobile phone number. The banks need to be connected to the FPS.
Customers can access the system via smartphone, tablet or PC using the mobile applications of banks connected to the FPS. In order to make an instant transfer, customers should select the account from which the payment will be made in the FPS Transfer section of their bank’s application and indicate the payee’s mobile phone number and the amount. After the payer has confirmed the transaction, funds are transferred and become available to the payee within seconds.
The Faster Payments System was jointly developed by the Bank of Russia and the National Payment Card System. It was launched and has been in commercial use since 28 January 2019.
Using phone numbers? Why are they necessary where simply bank account numbers are fine? And what if I have several bank accounts with the same phone number? That makes me think that this is some add-on system instead of a default payment mode from account to account.
Same. I use Google from inertia, but I have not noticed that it performs better when I do use Bing.
Software isn't manufacturing. Modern advanced manufacturing is incredibly capital intensive and efficient with a multitude of different inputs and a mass of intermediate products. This makes the global market of advanced economies incredibly efficient, but also means there's a lot of things being made at only a few locations and the entire system is dependent on the collective worldwide network.
Russia, on it's own or in it's post-Soviet sphere, isn't nearly large enough, nor well capitalized, to replicate this on it's own. So a pariah Russia will become an inefficient and poor Russia, even more so than it was with the USSR.
Russia provides efficient inputs to a lot of European added value chains; cutting Russia from Europe/pushing it East also makes European manufacturing inefficient because global market was balanced around European access to Russian energy and metals (and replacements in many cases are scarce).
Russia is sufficiently well-capitalized to replicate some critical parts (and money are still flowing in), but not necessarily has enough consumers to make replacement production cheap.
Energy is highly fungible in the medium term, not at all like advance manufacturing. Russian energy exports aren't at all comparable in effect to losing access to things like German industrial equipment. It simply isn't the same thing at all.
Also capital isn't just money in this situation, it also technology and know-how Russia completely lacks and isn't remotely replaceable any time soon.
"Medium term" is quite long as far as energy requirements for entire Europe are concerned; from several years to several decades and there are multiple challenges along the way. Qatar so far refuses to consider less-then-20-years gas deal; Algeria is peeved at Spanish gas re-exports to Morocco.
Medium term should be sufficient to create advanced manufacturing at least for some parts. Some manufacturing is already in place and just needs to be adapted to serve new needs. For example, analogues of large gas turbines like currently used for Nord Stream 1 (and caught in sanctions, unable to be shipped after manufacturer repairs) are already produced in Russia; some LNG equipment is also already at testing stages.
Russia still has plenty of human capital and expertise. There is no "Western magic" that cannot be learned with effort - a lot of "Western power" was mostly in reliability and convenience, things that sanctions completely undermined.
Will that move Russia from "ideal cooperative efficiency"? Sure.
Will it make Russian manufacturing completely unable to function? Not necessarily.
Just like in Europe many companies become unprofitable and have to close at current energy prices, so will some export-oriented businesses in Russia (and rouble strengthening isn't helping there either).
But manufacturing serving local market - and possibly those that can re-orient toward Asia - should survive.
You're persistently failing to understand the scale of the issue. Natural gas and crude oil are two commodities used in bulk available globally to whoever touches tidewater.
Industrial components are thousands upon thousands of minor components, most of which are limited to a handful of producers, efficient production of which requires considerable learning by doing and trade secrets produce at modern standards, on top of industrial capital that it only pays off to invest in if your market is the world, not one declining middle income state. It's not a matter that Russians are capable as individuals, it's that no state of it's population size and wealth can go it alone at all efficiently. These are absurdly large problems you're handwaving at.
You wrote "Librya" instead of "Libya"
"a sentiment I share after reading about the East Asian economic miracle (the greatest anti-poverty program in history) facilitated by American intervention in How Asia Works"
Communist China did not make economic reforms due to American intervention. In your own review you note that Meiji Japan also enacted land reforms without the US. Instead the commonality between successful east Asian countries and less successful ones (Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia) is that the latter are located further south. The Philippines, after all, was taken by the US in the Spanish-American war and not fully independent until after WW2 (and afterward was a US client state).
The contrast with realpolitik is not that great, in my opinion. Mearsheimer, for example, also discusses "national" interests in terms of populations and special interests with collective features. The "public", for example, generally prefers security over chaos, and tends toward a collective national interest in that regard. Bismarck himself noticed that a safe political bet is on a conservative public that will sacrifice personal comfort for national glory.
One theory that I don't think gets enough play is the random events theory. For example, if Al Gore instead of George W. Bush were president at the time, it seems unlikely that the US would have invaded Iraq. But who got elected depended on random events in Florida during the previous election.
Similarly it seems like the US response to Ukraine had something to do with Biden being president, since Ukraine was already important to him. Would a second term Hillary Clinton or maybe a first term Republican (if she only got one term) have handled it differently? Maybe?
Neither "grand strategy" nor "public choice" hold up very well when you consider that US leaders tend not to be elected based on foreign policy.
More generally, it seems like any theory of history should be evaluated against a default assumption that history isn't predictable. What does a flat prior look like, and can you show that you can do better than that?
I think a flat prior would have to say that the US is equally likely to go to war with all countries. All IR theories can legitimately outperform this.
These aren't truly random events though. There's a certain menu of things that are likely to happen, and we pick randomly from that menu. Understanding how things end up on the list of things that _might_ plausibly happen should be the goal.
So, President Gore probably wouldn't have invaded Iraq. He probably would have invaded Afghanistan, though. He definitely wouldn't have invaded Uruguay or New Zealand.
This essay contains a bit of plagiarism. Read the paragraph that starts with "The culture war has morphed into a hyperreal form..." under the Russian Invasion of Ukraine section.
Then, read the comment I left on February 28, 2022 under a post on Richard Hanania's Substack. It's the top comment on that post.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/lessons-from-forecasting-the-ukraine/comments#comment-5301829
A few of the sentences have been copied almost verbatim. To be honest, I feel more flattered than mad, but it still seems necessary to point this out.
In my opinion, this should automatically disqualify the book review.
I'm not sure how to get this to the attention of Scott since, as some people have pointed out, this review isn't anonymous either and last I checked that had not been noticed. However, you should point this out in a reply to a comment by Scott. That should at least send him a notification
Will do.
For a book supposedly about foreign policy, according to review it discusses surprisingly little of the international circumstances or historical contingencies context that has resulted in the US military action and troop deployments across across the globe as it currently is.
The reviewer appears partisan, in not very bright way, for not discussing any of this when parroting stuff from the book. It also makes it a very bad review as a review, because mostly the author seems to just write quite opinionated statements as facts, sourced apparently from the book being "reviewed" ( "Once again, Hanania shows ... ", "It is clear to me that Hanania’s public choice model should usurp the conventional unitary actor model ..."). Genuine critical evaluation of the claims in the book, reviewing and checking it with information from other sources, as expected for a good review: not done at all.
Because the reviewer just says how Hanania is obviously correct about anything, the book's claimed superior rigor remains quite unexamined.
Some other supposed "book reviews" have been guilty of same lack of critical legwork, especially the fusion power book, but here the issues are glaring.
I am also dismayed by the lack of critical evaluation in this review.
There are also points where I see errors of fact and/or glaring omissions:
- "It’s difficult to see what threat the US is protecting against in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany ... the fall of the Soviet Union has not seen any withdrawal as promised to Gorbachev but rather expansion of troops right up to the border of the Russian Federation."
It's disputed just what the U.S. promised Gorbachev, which is addressed in a prior comment by nifty775. I therefore won't focus on that point. I read this statement, however, to maintain the U.S. hasn't withdrawn any military forces from Europe since the end of the Cold War. U.S. troop levels in Europe were ~340,000 in 1987, and up to that year had consistently been above 250,000 since the early 1950's. They declined to ~100,000 by 1995, hit a trough of ~65,000 in 2018, and recently increased to ~100,000. (Source: https://www.axios.com/2022/03/23/where-100000-us-troops-are-stationed-europe ) Perhaps the review's phrasing is simply unclear, but I read it to misstate the reality of this decline.
- "Step 4 of regime change has yet to happen as a result of the harshest sanctions against Cuba since 1959, Iraq since 1998, Syria since 2011, and Venezuela since 2019. The Bush, Clinton, new Bush, and Obama administrations all stuck to a policy of not speaking with adversaries, which is the opposite of achieving foreign policy goals by providing targeted regimes a clear path towards the removal of sanctions."
In at least one of the identified cases - Cuba - the U.S. in fact reinstated formal diplomatic relations in 2015 (during the Obama administration). Whether the U.S. and Cuba had been "speaking" even earlier is at least a matter of debate, because the U.S had a "United States Interest Section" in Havana from 1977 to 2015. That section was not formally an embassy, but it was staffed by U.S. Foreign Service Officers. Cuba similarly operated an Interests Section in Washington, D.C. from 1977 to 2015.
It's also striking that Iran and North Korea are omitted from this list.
At least every U.S. administration from Clinton onward held talks with North Korea, with the Agreed Framework of 1994 and discussions during the George W. Bush administration both following a general framework of "providing [the targeted North Korean regime] a clear path towards the removal of sanctions". U.S. policy toward North Korea is widely regarded as a failure because North Korea did ultimately develop nuclear weapons and has maintained a nuclear weapons program. It's also a clear case, though, of the U.S. pursuing its goals by speaking with an adversarial regime that's been targeted by sanctions.
Similarly, during the Obama administration the U.S., Iran, and five other countries signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Again, this agreement broadly followed "providing [the targeted Iranian regime] a clear path towards the removal of sanctions". (That agreement was controversial, and the Trump administration withdrew from it.)
- "The Pentagon has a budget of $700 billion for fiscal year 2019 (higher than it was at the end of the cold war even after adjusting for inflation)"
This claim appears to be true as stated. It's highly unusual, however, to use inflation adjustment as the sole metric (or even primary metric) for comparing budget spending over a period separated by several decades. It's more common to see the comparison stated in terms of GDP. By that measure, U.S. defense spending in 2019 is 3.7% of GDP compared to ~6% in the late 1980's. The Cold War-era trough for defense spending was ~5% of GDP in the late 1970's. (Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locations=US )
Isn't the book's treatment of the Unitary Actor Model/Realism something of a straw man? Presumably the UAM argument is that "American elites/leadership act as a single force in their own collective interest," not, "American foreign policy exists to promote the interests of every American, right down to little Timmy Terwilliger in Tinyville, Iowa." Iraq might have been great from the perspective of enforcing the global hegemony of America's rulers by visibly punishing an apparent defector (the less defecting the better, if you're trying to enforce "suck up to me or die" and have the means to do so). It's not clear why they'd care about dead soldiers/Iraqi's/whatever.
There's also a big jump from "It wasn't really about counterinsurgency or 9/11" to stating America's foreign policy is a by-product of elite competition; presumably the propaganda line is put out by a rational agent, and is almost a line against the public choice model as it requires conscious deception in the interest of a unitary actor. It's the equivalent of responding to, "The USSR pursued a grand strategy of dominating Europe," by saying, "No they didn't, they never empowered the proletariat at all."
The real question is whether the US oligarchy is too laden with defectors to act in its own self-interest. It may well be, but I don't think you can infer that it is from the fact that it successfully maintains a global hegemony.
My problem here- this book suggests a reality that is contrasted to some possible perception. Who actually has this pereption? Obviously there are different people and institutions who influence foreign policy in terms of some kind of general model of a strategy they think should guide foreign policy. But the book seems to set up a strawman to make its points in the form of contrast.
The strawman seems "not even wrong" to me. Its not even "who argues this?" He doesn't make it clear what the view he rhetorically writes as though he's arguing against would even coherently look like. At least from what I got from the review.
I'm very sympathetic to the overall thesis of applying public choice theory to international relations. I could draw many examples from other times and places. For instance, by declaring war on the United States the Imperial Japanese navy was able to prevent the Army from getting all the glory of the war in China and potentially reallocation of things like steal production to them. The British sent a lot of tea to Boston right before the American Revolution because most of the cabinet had East India Company stock, there was a tea glut, and they had to do something with the excess tea. The decision that the tea should be taxed was made at a much lower level and none of the cabinet was aware of it. Bismark's Germany allied with Austria-Hungary before WWI because if the later collapsed then the Austrian rump might have sought to join Germany, disrupting the preeminence of the protestant Prussians by adding too many catholic Austrians.
The above is all a bit caricatured, but I think no more so than the arguments the book seems to give according to this account.
Yeah, I'd have liked to see the reviewer do a bit of analysis regarding whether these are "just-so" stories or not.
The US wants to be a principled, benevolent force for freedom, happiness and prosperity. I never understood why it sometimes implements policies such as war on Iraq, given it had not solved Afghanistan at the time.
This book changed my view of the world by giving me a key of Public Choice Theory application to IR. It also gave me a wealth of information on past foreign policy anomalies.
It seems to me now that this imperialist aspect of America has come to be after the end of indian wars in 1880. Mahan theory provided the ideology and the steel trusts having completed the railroads and looking for new commissions provided the material basis for a navy. This has been instrumental in causing a global arm's race that led to WW1, and never abated in the last 140 years.
I am now wondering if we should see as an application of Arrow impossibility:
- dictatorships follow a single utility function and can optimize it rationally,
- democracies have many competing utilities being optimized. Hence the US is an unpredictable two-faced gods, sometimes peaceful, sometimes imperialist.
It seems natural that with so much power would come some policy mistakes, but the the IR competence level seems to be going down in democracies. Kennedy had a brain-trust with Kissinger and other scholars inviting European and third-world leaders to discuss policy, but not much occurred after the 90s Washington consensus. This gets replaced by the Bush crusades in Afghanistan and Iraq and Trump twitter trade wars and alternative pronouncement.
Is the US less competent now than they were in the last 140 years or does it come by waves?
> I never understood why it sometimes implements policies such as war on Iraq, given it had not solved Afghanistan at the time.
My recollection is that in 2002, it seemed like we had solved Afghanistan. A brief show of force, a couple of hundred casualties, and the Taliban scattered. A nice-looking bloke in a fancy hat became President and promised to hold free and fair elections. The whole thing had gone a lot easier than anyone imagined, and we started thinking "Oh shit, turns out we're invincible. We should start using this power for good" and we started making a list of other shit dictators who needed their asses kicked.
Turns out things were more complicated than anyone understood in 2002, but it all seemed pretty sensible at the time.
Overall, I really liked this review; I'm skeptical of the book's thesis (but much less so after reading this review than before).
One minor quibble though:
> Somalia and Yugoslavia are some of the least strategically important states in the 1990s
My understanding is that Somalia, like Cuba back in the day, is important for what it lies near - the international shipping route through the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, where Somali pirates are a problem that at the very least adds to the cost of shipping anything through there.
I think the Yugoslavia issue, apart from "genocide is bad", is that Europe was unhappy with the amount of refugees it was getting?
Not so very anonymous, J.
Does this book anywhere delve into the foreign policies of nations other than the United States of America?
Does it substantially discuss US foreign policy prior to the end of the Cold War?
Does it discuss *changes* in American foreign policy in the post-Cold-War era and how public choice theory led to those changes?
It seems to be discussing a general thesis that should apply to all nations (or at least all democracies) at all times, but from the review it supports that thesis by showing how closely it matches one data point: post-cold-war American foreign policy seen as uniform interventionism. One can of course fit an infinite number of curves through one data point.
Huh, you're right; the examples were all familiar and salient to me, so I didn't stop to think "hold on these are all from the same era in the same place."
The link to another book review by the same author effectively de-anonymizes them. Was that intentional?
I don't think I've ever had such a negative reaction to such a positive review. Like if you write a serious book about international relations I as a rando should not be able to identify howling factual errors in it by just skimming over a review. Hanania cites debunked studies, or studies so ludicrous that they don't even need debunking, as serious evidence that sanctions lead to mass death. Iraq has been covered but the entire methodology of the "40,000 excess deaths in Venezuela" claim is literally just that one guy, who is not a Venezuela expert and who admits that Venezuela's economic collapse predated the sanctions and would have happened anyway without them, guesses that the sanctions after 2017 made the collapse roughly twice as bad as it would have been, so he takes the number of deaths attributable to Venezuela's economic collapse from 2017 and divides it by 2 and says OK that's how many people the sanctions killed.
I also twigged on the claim that America, "blatantly violating international law," conducted 237 American military interventions between 1950 and 2017 (3.5 per year), which was immediately suspicious to me because it's a dramatically higher number than I've ever heard anyone claim, and I have heard a lot of dumb exaggerated claims about U.S. military intervention. This is based on a real but unpublished dataset, whose authors seem to tout a lot of incredibly dubious claims that they say their dataset supports. One of the things that they are specifically proud of is that they found twice as many "U.S. military interventions" as anyone else did before, both by using the most expansive definition of "U.S. military intervention" that they could, and by meticulously digging up "interventions" so inconsequential that it took intense research to find out that they even happened at all. The actual list isn't public anywhere that I can find, so I don't get to go down it and laugh at all the completely trivial "interventions," but at a minimum I can say it includes a great many embassy evacuation missions (probably they were only pretending to evacuate those diplomats, as a cover for some kind of atrocity) and the blatant international crime of having loaned three transport planes to the Congolese government during an army revolt in 1967. Another thing they seem to do is derive novel and extremely surprising findings that they admit are obviously puzzling, and then just treat them as true with no explanation of how they're not just obvious pseudo-results derived from dumb methods. Like they are very proud of finding that the U.S. actually got more militaristic and did more intervention abroad after the Cold War ended, which they tout over and over even though it's completely insane and obviously no-one should accept it on the level of evidence they have publicly made available. It really seems like all they've really found is that the U.S. military operated very dispersedly and did many individual small-scale peacekeeping and do-gooding missions, which technically counts as "more intervention" if the way you count it is that 10 six-month missions of 10 guys each count as "ten interventions," which is ten times as many interventions as the Vietnam War. They also tout a variety of times and places in which the U.S. purportedly "escalated" conflicts while its hapless adversaries sought "de-escalation," but it is not obvious that they are actually measuring this at all. For example they present it as damning that during a period when Mexico was overrun by rebels and bandits and had essentially no functioning government, the U.S. government sent troops in to shoot at those bandits (4/5 escalation units) while the Mexican government that barely existed and had no capacity to do anything did not in fact do anything (0/5 escalation units). They seem especially proud of the fact that this finding accords with the high prevalence of anti-Americanism in Mexico; actually one of the major themes of their research seems to be that Third World anti-Americanism is a reasonable phenomenon that exists because of real things America has actually done, and even provides a kind of direct evidence of American guilt.
I will stop going on about this particular source because I've already spent way too long on this comment and the point has basically been made. Hanania is full of shit and if you found his book impressively rigorous it is because you have no idea what you're talking about and don't recognize obviously stupid claims when you read them.
1.) My impression as well; thought this was pretty unconvincing overall, although I remember thinking the author's other review was decent. This one didn't attempt to analyze or question a single thing in the book and used language that boils down to "wow this is indisputable genius and would convince everyone in the entire field if only they read it". I, uh, did not find it so.
2.) This is an excellent and cogent response, but I worry that the "full of shit" part might get it deleted. I've seen similar characterisations pass unmolested, but maybe Scott will feel differently since Hanania is commenting? I dunno, maybe not — but I've saved it in case it gets deleted and you don't want to rewrite it all, just FYI.
I obviously didn't explain myself very well. I'm describing the mentality of the European PMC (I'm not really equipped to discuss the US equivalent) and it's Russia since 2000, rather than Putin, that's the problem. Russia in the European PMC mind is what it always has been: full of brutal, uncivilised untermenschen. Russia is the anti-Europe, the anti-Maastricht, the shadow that has to be eradicated for western civilisation to survive. It's not new, of course: I write from France, and eighty years ago, French volunteers were fighting in Russia against the brutal Slavic hordes, French manufacturers like Renault were delivering equipment to the Wehrmacht, the French media was full of hate propaganda, and the Swastika flew over Paris. After decades of suppression, the hate has burst out again.
I am genuinely curious: why do European governments do strategic business with Russia then? German industry is thought to be extremely dependent on Russian exports and the cheap and uninterrupted supply of natural gas - Russlandversteher is a word after all. And France has exported military kit extensively to Russia - the ultimately cancelled Mistral deal was/is just the tip of the iceberg.
Money has no smell, I understand, but to me European governments and European big business always seemed to be in a much closer cooperation with their Russian counterparts that the hatred you have just described would imply.
It's a good question, and there is no one explanation. It may be easier to turn it round, and ask what's missing? Any sense of a long-term political, economic and strategic relationship with Russia. Instead, we have a series of ad hoc arrangements based on energy costs, buying raw materials where it's cheapest, finding a market for certain products that Europe still makes, and so forth, with no coherent vision at all. It's not necessary a paradox, for example, to buy from or sell to people you privately despise. The relationship between Germany and Russia has been historically very complicated, to put it mildly, and in the French case, the urge to play an independent role in European issues, not subordinate to the United States, is still strong.
> After decades of suppression, the hate has burst out again.
I am curious, would you describe USSR as evil/murderous/bad/typical empire?
Or are you one of people who have no problem with USSR (or Putin's Russia) expanding to rule over Eastern and Central Europe, no matter what people living there want? Or equating "against communism" or "against USSR" with "supporting Nazis/being Nazis"?
My point is that the kind of feelings that have burst out now are independent of any developments in the Soviet Union/Russia. They are deeply anchored in the European psyche: I've argued that in some form they go back to the Middle Ages: https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/europes-inner-demons
I think the non-answer you were given points to "no" on the first and "yes" on the latter two questions.
I'm rather sceptical of your claim that there is a deep rooted hatred of Russia in the French population. As far as I am aware, they go far behind England and Germany in our little book of national hatred.
I think I made it clear that I was talking about a small part of the population of each European country: the political, media and intellectual classes. I agree with you about the French as a whole.
I don't think I agree either ? Especially in the French case. There is a deeply rooted fascination for Russian literature (and music), and politically we have been more prorussia than our ally during all the cold war.
>”It’s difficult to see what threat the US is protecting against in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany. The rise of China has not lead to increase in troop deployment in Japan or South Korea; the wars in the Greater Middle East has not resulted in the influx of the bulk of troops from the former Axis powers; the fall of the Soviet Union has not seen any withdrawal as promised to Gorbachev but rather expansion of troops right up to the border of the Russian Federation.”
American bases in the UK, Italy, and Germany do not exist because Uncle Sam believes that those countries will likely be attacked. They exist to ensure that if they are attacked, Americans will die in the initial exchanges, thus committing the U. S. to war against the aggressor(s).
This is going to sound uncharitable, but I suspect that reviewer here made a great disservice to the author by writing such adulatory non-review. Or perhaps not. Maybe the book is really as shallow as this makes it look, I am obviously not going to buy it based on this.
Only think I can say with certainty is that on his substack Hanania usually has better arguments. And Tyler Cowen was impressed by the book (as noted in the review), which is a point in its favor: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/what-ive-been-reading-210.html.
I like the parts describing how American foreign policy is captured by special interests, but I am surprised about the recommendations to Make Russia Great Again.
Is Pax Americana dead? From my perspective, the existence of NATO is the only reason why Russian soldiers are not patrolling on streets of smaller Eastern European countries such as Slovakia where I live. Because I have no illusion about EU willingness to defend its members; Germany and France would sell us to Russia in a heartbeat, if Putin in return offered them a small temporary discount on gas.
On the other hand, Russia is a super... what? Russia is basically Saudi Arabia with nukes. If the nukes magically disappeared today, Poland and Ukraine together could probably defeat them.
Allowing Russia to expand, by letting them take as much of Ukraine as they want to (which means the entire territory, according to Putin's own words), seems like the kind of "wisdom" that resulted in Munich Betrayal in 1938. Tomorrow you will have a Russia that is just as angry as today, only larger.
(By the way, is there any proof of the "withdrawal [of NATO] as promised to Gorbachev"? I see this mentioned all the time, but always without a citation. Who promised that, when, and using which words exactly? Also, is it possible that those words came with the assumption that Russia would become a democracy and stop attacking its neighbors?)
"We know what the Russians want. They have made clear, openly and consistently, that they do not want NATO to keep expanding." -- Yeah, that is a *part* of what they want. Also, it may be worth mentioning that the reason they do not want the surrounding countries to join NATO is because they plan to attack them and take their territory. (If you don't believe me, you may want to read e.g. "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians".) Because this changes the context a bit, doesn't it?
"a narrative in which Russian hackers and influence operations are behind everything", sounds like someone is not familiar with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood technique
Yeah, all the discourse about "we should respect Russia's wishes" is unsurprisingly less common in countries which are under the direct threat of a Russian invasion...
Excellent points that I didn't consider before. Thanks for this.
As a Frenchman, I have to strongly protest your characterization.
Yes, the treacherous Germans would sell you out for gaz in a heartbeat. But our proud nation, which still has a lot of nuclear power production, wouldn't be so threatened by embargoes on Russian gas. We would sell you to Russia after *at least* twenty heartbeats.
The Germans, they would sell you out. Us French are not that crassly materialistic, we would give you out to Russia for free.
Thanks, not as granular as euro data but probably good enough for now.
This was a rather uneven and at times confusing review.
The author is very opinionated, and has a lot of axes to grind. It is difficult to see where the review ends, and his/her own opinions start. S/he (I suspect a he) is also fond of moralizing before doing the analysis, or instead of an analysis (doing it afterwards can be ok, but starting out with the moralizing usually reduces your IQ points by 10, as they say).
At the risk of sounding crabby, let me pick out some of the less certain statements, presented as truths:
“Pax Americana is dead, but a multipolar world will be more humane. “ Hah, yeah! Or: Be careful what you wish for. Many of us living in small European countries dread the coming instability of a multipolar world, which is why we are so deeply worried that hegemony seems to be slipping from the present “a house divided against itself cannot stand” – America.
The thing is that historically, periods without major world wars are periods where everyone knows that there is only one top dog, and that dog will win a major conflict. Even during the so-called cold war (1948-92), everyone knew deep down that even if there was a nuclear exchange, the US would highly likely come out on top. That is why all conflicts stayed local. Bring on genuine multipolarism – like the so-called “European concert” before 1914 – and sooner or later one of the large powers will risk it. Hell, why can’t the Republicans and Democrats bury the hatchet and make sure the US stays strong, so that us small-country folks may continue to sleep in peace? (The median country in the world has approx. 6 million citizens.)
“Public choice theory is better than realism” seems to me the main take-away of the review. The author seems to lump everything that is not “realism” into the public choice-bracket. But there are several other ways to analyse foreign policy. For example, everybody should read the fun-to-read classic by Allison, on the Cuban missile crisis (“reads like a novel”). He puts in one after the other a) the rational actor (RAT) interpretation of the crisis, b) the organizational process model, and c) the governmental politics-model. The last one seems close to what the author labels “public choice” by the way – though “public choice” is rather something in-between RAT and the other two.
Otherwise, the review seems to confirm the old political science - saying: “All foreign policy is at heart domestic policy”.
On Ukraine, here is the NATO line of thinking, as far as I can judge, and it is sort-of a RAT way of thinking: a) It will highly likely have to be a negotiated settlement, since Putin was unable to scare Zelensky into exile, or kill him. b) Zelensky must choose when to sue for peace, we will not (and likely cannot) do that on his behalf. c) Our choice in this situation is to provide Zelensky with the best possible bargaining position, come the time when he is ready for negotiations. This implies providing him with all the arms and other stuff he asks for, as well as sanctioning Putin to the best of our ability.
Again: The policy is about influencing the bargaining position of Zelensky, including making it credible to Putin that NATO will not suddenly waver – that would reduce his reason for accepting, or initiating, negotiations.
The author boo-hooing the sanctions is acting as a useful idiot (Lenin’s old phrase) to Putin. I would not mind that so much if it was a cynical move on behalf of the author, since I respect professional propaganda competence. But I have a distinct feeling that the author sincerely means what s/he says, and that is just irritating.
Sorry for the crabbiness, but I have visited Ukraine a few times, including the beautiful cities of Kyiv, Lviv (old Lemberg) and Odessa, so this is a bit personal.
To what extent does the message of this book come down to "Second approximation is better than first approximation"?
To first approximation, it makes sense to model countries as individual actors supporting their own interests. To second approximation, we need to zoom in and see that a country's policies are determined by multiple conflicting groups. That's fine; first approximations are easier to deal with, second approximations are more accurate but more complicated.
A better approximation still would be to realise that actually a country is made up of millions of people who all have their own individual beliefs and reasons for supporting them. That's a much better approximation, although the downside is that you can't meaningfully use it for predictions.
What is with the light blue background? I find it very difficult to read. Links are a slightly different shade and they almost disappear: I can see the words are there, but they're like blank spots as I'm reading smoothly - I have to stop and look at the links specifically to read the words. (Maybe it's just me - I also have a lot of trouble with white on black text). It's also a really ugly color - maybe that's why I find it distracting?
Did anyone else read the four proposed norm changes beginning with "the press" with a feeling of ironic sadness? I suppose it depends on what a person means by "the press", but i can't imagine even such modest changes being possible without replacing every single person currently employed by "the press". Indeed, treating of the military-industrial complex without recognizing that for a long time now it has been the military-industrial-media complex seems either naive or an attempt to avoid hit-pieces.
When you say "Saddam had neither WMD nor terrorist ties," by what method do you exclude Hussein's support of Abu Nidal from the latter category?
The notion that sanctions are ineffective at forcing governments to change their behavior (or causing them to outright fall apart) is flat-out false.
Examples of regime change (either via coup or otherwise) as a result of sanctions include:
* Iran in 1953
* Finland in 1958
* Ceylon/Sri Lanka in 1965
* Chile in 1973
* Lesotho in 1986
* South Africa in the 1990s
* Malawi in 1993
* Guatemala in 1993
Sanctions have also caused other desired behavioral changes, with threatened or actual sanctions causing:
* Yugoslavia to back down in 1921
* Greece to back down in 1925
* The Dutch to allow Indonesia to become independent in 1949
* India to change its agricultural policies in 1966
* South Korea to not buy a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in the mid 1970s
* Taiwan to abandon nuclear weapon development in 1977
* El Salvador not to release people who murdered Americans in 1988
* Albania to reduce the sentences of Greeks in 1995.
Sanctions are, in fact, highly effective at crippling governments. The reality is that being a pariah state not only makes it quite likely that your regime won't last, but also means that your country will deteriorate and not be economically relevant.
Where does this list come from? I would like to read the list compiler's explanation of why they think sanctions, not other factors, played the key role.
What was the chance the Chilean military would carry out a coup regardless? Think: right-wing Latin American military, socialist president... how many such situations DIDN'T end in a successful coup between 1945 and 1990?
What was the chance that the end of the Cold War would lead the apartheid government to negotiate with the ANC about peacefully ending apartheid regardless of whether there had been Western sanctions?
Malawi's Hastings Banda was born sometime between 1898 and 1906, and we're talking about an event in 1993. Think about him at that age. Against the backdrop of the end of the Cold War, and more-or-less free elections happening in a number of African countries, what are the chances he was going to give in anyway, due to running low on the energy needed to be a successful repressive dictator in a newly more challenging environment?
You are assuming it is just one factor that leads to a government being overthrown. It is often a combination of factors that, when combined, cause enough people to feel conditions are intolerable/feel the government is weak enough to be overthrown.
There was substantial popular support for the coups in Chile and Iran, as both of them were quite unpopular by the end of their rule, in part because these leaders ruined the economies of their countries, and in part because of their dictatorial, authoritarian nature and own coups that attempted to seize total control (Allende called for a revolution days before he was overthrown, Mossadegh ran a fake election to give himself absolute power shortly before he was overthrown as well).
The deterioration of domestic conditions often leads governments to fall apart or to have another group win the next election or whatever.
Sanctions also worked against Japan during World War II, as it was put in pretty dire straits by the US cutting it off, which caused Japan to attack the US in a war it had no hope of winning. But if Japan hadn't attacked the US, it would have been starved of fuel and unable to operate.
In fact, this is very frequently what happens; the sanctions put the regime into a lose-lose situation, where it either is going to lose power due to being unpopular, or has to crack down to avoid losing power.
Economic hardship is a common factor in the fall of governments; why would sanctions NOT have an impact?
Putin is terrified of being murdered by his countrymen because of the hell he has put them in as a result of his actions.
We appear to use 'as a result of' differently. Imagine I throw a rock at a house which is already sliding off the edge of an eroded cliff. To be thorough, I suppose, the house falls 'as a result of the erosion and the thrown rock'. I guess, technically, it's not untrue to say the house falls 'as a result of the thrown rock', so long as you are not also denying the erosion.
However, this isn't how I normally use English. Normally I focus on a subset of causes - those that play the 'key role', as I wrote above - because I care more about modeling reality than I do about philosophy (except in certain moods). Counterfactuals are philosophically rubbish, but we need them for modeling reality. This is why I am interested in guessing what would have happened in these cases without sanctions.
I would have to know more about most of these cases to have more confidence in my beliefs about whether sanctions were the key cause. This is why I asked you for the source of the list, so that I could go read it. Is it all your own research?
I don't know where you got the idea that I think sanctions normally have minimal impact, i.e. that I agreed more with Hanania than you about sanctions. My best guess is that your view is somewhat closer to the truth, i.e. it is less overstated. However, the advice that follows naturally from your view - use more sanctions - has not produced regime change (except through the intermediary of WWII) for the US's most threatening adversaries.
To answer your questions about why sanctions might not have an impact, the effect of sanctions might have an effect of minus 5 on government stability. But the resulting increase in nationalism, plus the leader's better justification for blaming failures on foreign meddling, might have an effect of plus 6. With a net gain of plus 1, that makes the government more stable. (This is not to mention the fact that less commerce reduces the chances for espionage, because spies can and do pose as foreign businesspeople.)
Your confidence about Putin's mental state suggests you may benefit from evaluating the sources of your own knowledge. I don't know what he is terrified of, if anything, and I don't expect to find out so long as he holds power.
My immediate thoughts on this are: While I normally like Richard Hanania for his insight into DOMPOL his FORPOL/IR take here is laughable, particularly of note is that unlike moldbuggian "cthulu always swims left" unfalsifiable claims, Hanania's articles on the CRA etc actually explain *how the left built the Cthulu* and that Cthulu isn't a liberal-progressive monster, it's a monster that draws its power from Moloch, and can be bred in a vat to do whatever you want.
"Soldiers have to be paid market salaries": LOL, LMAO. Basically anyone whose been in any nation's armed forces will tell you that's not the case.
A problem that I have with the arguments against interventions being a matter of great power competition are that the evidence presented has a hard time distinguishing between not being interested in great power competition and being interested in great power competition but being incompetent at it.
For example: "the war in Iraq did not in any way increase American power but rather empowered Iran"
The thing is, the planning and execution of that war are largely a matter of public record, and it's quite clear that empowering Iran was not the intended goal. The plan was to follow up the invasion of Iraq with regime changes of several other countries, concluding with Iran. A major contributor to how bad things went in Iraq was that those other countries (and particularly Iran and Syria) realized this and supported insurgents in Iraq in an attempt to stop the train right then and there before they too ended up on the chopping block. To put it another way, the war ended up empowering Iran because Iran's foreign policy elites beat our foreign policy elites in the game of geopolitical chess.
Another particularly weak point:
"It’s difficult to see what threat the US is protecting against in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany."
The reasons there...seem pretty obvious? The troops in the UK are there to control important strategic points in the North Sea. Italy is the same for the Mediterranean (plus bases in Italy have been used in interventions in North Africa such as in Libya). Germany is, depending on your level of cynicism (and these aren't mutually exclusive) to protect the rest of Europe from the threat of a rearmed Germany or to make sure that the one country that is theoretically capable of challenging US hegemony in Western Europe isn't in a position to do so. Bases in Germany are no longer very useful in keeping the Russians out (even now that we are actually concerned again about keeping the Russians out), but they're still very important to keeping the Americans in and the Germans down.
I felt like the Ukrainian case for public choice could have been much stronger. In fact, it seems to put the cart before the PCT horse by discussing the manufactured populism surrounding support of Ukraine in the war. (Not that this wasn't the natural course, given that Russia was the aggressor, but the positive feelings toward Ukraine seem manufactured to me.) It also seems to focus entirely on the West's response, assuming Russia's role to be a given and not subject to PCT itself.
A much better explanation, from a public choice theory perspective, is the one advanced in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo6w5R6Uo8Y
The argument that the major players - most notably Russia - are really just responding to economic incentives surrounding oil and gas seems to fit the timeline and the choice of targets. For example:
2005 - Azerbaijan completes a pipeline through Georgia bypassing Russian pipelines to Europe; in response, the US supports Georgian entry into NATO
2008 - Russia invades Georgia to block NATO membership (and keep the potential for future annexation of the country/pipeline on the table)
Early 2010's - Massive reserves discovered in Ukraine (centered in Crimea, some near Lviv, and on a line from Donbass to Kiev) threatening Russia's market with Europe through their 'own' pipeline network
2011-2013 - Western energy company deals struck to explore new NG fields
2014 - Pro-western political revolution in Ukraine
2014 - Crimea invaded, Donbass war
2014 - Western petrol companies withdraw from Ukrainian projects
2022 - With gas prices high, Russia invades mostly territory rich in natural gas and coal
I'm not saying other causes aren't important. I'm saying if you're trying to advance a Public Choice Theory explanation for what's happening in Ukraine right now, it's odd to focus on public opinion (something that PCT would see as downstream of root causes) and not on economic forces, like competition for the European energy market.
What of the Western response? Some actors in Europe wanted a quick end to the conflict - i.e. before winter when Russia could hold Europe hostage by limiting oil and NG exports, as they've done to Ukraine directly in the past. The US and others want the war to grind on for years so Russia isn't able to compete in other areas globally, making it unlikely the war will end by winter and requiring a new strategy to handle the winter energy supply problem.
Some countries began stockpiling NG supplies during the summer, in preparation for winter cutoffs from Russia. So Russia slowed NG deliveries through Nordstream 1 and other sources, forcing the Europeans to liberate stockpiles and keeping them from accumulating enough to take the pressure off this coming winter. In response, Lithuania cut off railway supplies to Kaliningrad. This was an implicit threat to Russia that if they try to hold Europe hostage this winter by cutting off NG supplies, the West can in turn cut off all supplies to Russians in Kaliningrad (since Russia doesn't have any other Baltic Sea ports that don't freeze over in the winter, they wouldn't be able to resupply by sea). Moves and counter-moves, all centered around energy supply issues now and into the future.
(If a PCT explanation surrounding energy supply is truly the tail wagging the dog in this conflict, we would expect Russia's threat to cut off NG supplies to Europe this winter to be mostly bluff. They could cut off NG for short periods of time - a couple of weeks maybe - but Russia is funded by those sales, so they can't afford to cut off that market completely. Indeed, the longer they force Europe to do without, the more Europe will find ways to cope and the smaller the market for Russian energy going into the future. There's an old saying that when you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank owns you; but when you owe the bank a billion dollars, you own the bank. In that sense, Russia is dependent on the European market as much as the Europeans are dependent on Russian energy. Thus, the dance at the periphery to edge out competitors without alienating the market. A quick Ukrainian war would have accomplished that goal, but a protracted conflict gives opportunity to Russia's energy competitors.)
The war has strengthened NATO as a military alliance. As such, it is providing new arms sales and expanding markets into Eastern Europe - good for arms sales. Meanwhile, it has put pressure on countries throughout Europe to build out energy infrastructure that's independent of fossil fuels. Once Putin cut himself off from that conversation by invading, pro-nuclear/solar/wind/electric vehicle/etc. interests became free to lobby for increased subsidies and urgency in expanding their own roles in the energy production/consumption markets throughout Europe.
Why should it be odd that some wars are illegal and others are not?
Generalizing from sub-state interaction, as the book and reviewer do, it's perfectly normal that some acts of violence are legal and some are not.
> Second, the public is ignorant of foreign affairs, so those who control the flow of information have excess influence. Even politicians and bureaucrats are ignorant, for example most(!) counterterrorism officials — the chief of the FBI’s national security branch and a seven-term congressman then serving as the vice chairman of a House intelligence subcommittee, did not know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.
Wow. This is an amazing fact, if true. Is there anyone who's read the book who can point me to the citation?