Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Experts

So, like, there's this idea on, like, the populist right, that, like, we tried libertarianism and now wokeness has taken over it. I'm like, "Okay, when did Republicans repeal the Civil Rights Act? Like, when did that happen? When did they defund public educa- education?"

(laughs)

Like, no, you actually haven't done anything close to libertarianism, and now you're making libertarianism the scapegoat, um, for all these negative trends.

Right. (upbeat music) Today, I'm speaking with Richard Hanania, who is the president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship & Ideology, and the author of the new book, Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy. So Richard, first, can you just summarize the book briefly before we get into questions?

Uh, sure. So, the argument of my book is, it's, you know, it, it has two real audiences. So first, people who study international relations, political scientists, there's something in there for them. And there's also, I think, something in there for people who are just interested in American foreign policy more generally. Um, so the way that academics, uh, tend to study foreign policy, and this is, this is a, you know, a simplification, but if you're gonna have to, you know, generalize about, um, the way sort of it's understood in political science and the field of international relations. Uh, the idea is that states basically are rational actors, and rational actors doesn't mean what they do is, um, necessarily good for the world, or, um, or, you know, whether their values are consistent with other people's values. But basically that states seek certain goals, and their behavior can be understood in that context. Um, so basically, the study of grand strategy is sort of a, um, is a, uh, um, is a sort of a corollary of this. And the idea is that diplomatic, economic, and military means tend to be, um, put towards the s- -put towards the same goals. They're all basically moving in the same direction. Um, and I think this view of understanding foreign policy is, um, is sort of naive. My main argument, um, is that we don't think like this in terms of domestic policy. We don't think that there's a grand strategy of the US government with regards to immigration, uh, with regards to healthcare, with regards to, uh, tax system. It, it's sort of a, um, the, there's a fallacy of seeing a design in an international, uh, kind of a design in international relations, um, or kind of a, um, you know, a kind of a sort of goal-focused behavior, and we tend not to make that mistake in, uh, in other areas. So, that's, you know, the first two chapters are basically the, uh, uh, the theoretical, you know, th- the theoretical case for why a lot of the ways we look at international relations is wrong. Um, that, you know, if people are interested in academic, uh, works, they're interested in sort of thinking about ideas and political philosophy, I think they're, you know, people will enjoy those chapters. And then most of the rest of the book is basically looking at American foreign policy and asking, does a theory of grand strategy or a theory, uh, based on public choice, which I present as an alternative model, does that explain things like when the US, um, US, uh, mili- uh, troop pre- presence of tr- troop presences abroad? Um, when we start and, and, uh, end various wars, uh, the American sanctions regime. So, ma- major parts of American foreign policy, and I argue that the public choice, uh, model of foreign policy just works better.