- 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 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
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.
Good review. I liked the author’s idiosyncratic English. I suspect he is not an American and that this contributes a small amount to his sympathetic view of Hanania’s theory.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>”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?
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.
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?
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 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
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.
Good review. I liked the author’s idiosyncratic English. I suspect he is not an American and that this contributes a small amount to his sympathetic view of Hanania’s theory.
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.
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 {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.
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.
> 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".
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.
Typo: "Librya" (should be Libya) is one of the examples of part 3.
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
"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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>”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
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.
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?