There is an underlying assumption with this argument that I find troublesome: America does not have these rivals as much as it is actively making them rivals.
We can and should debate the morality of China's desire to control Taiwan, but Taiwan represents for China, a symbol of their former glory, and its cuddly relationship with the West is not looked upon kindly.
We can and should debate the morality of Russia's desire to invade Ukraine, but Ukraine's decision to join NATO and entrench itself with the EU are not choices Russia is willing to accept.
In the same vein that the USA was very uncomfortable with communist Cuba, and for good reason too.
If you are a great power, you don't want allies of your rival in your neighborhood: imagine if Mexico went communist and started cutting deals with china.
These countries are trying to control their respective regional spheres of influence
The only reason the USA sees this as a threat is because America has always thought the entire world is its sphere of influence.
And I don't need to list the terrible track record that has come out of such 'benovelent imperialism'.
This guy Brands is an absolute legend for posting this article on 9/11/2020 (https://www.aei.org/op-eds/trump-ike-and-the-myth-of-the-military-industrial-complex/) about how there is no military-industrial complex, while he was literally on the payroll of that very complex as a fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, funded by Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, US Navy, Royal Air Force, Boeing and so on.
“no massive anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11?” What world is Brands living in? Makes me question his authority on the rest of the topics covered in the interview
Noah, Brands sounds like a card-carrying member of the blob, determined to. prolong U.S. hegemony in the face of a steady decline. in our. role in the world economy and our multi-trillion dollar fiasco trying to bring thee free market and liberal democracy to the Middle East.
Please, do a comparable interview with someone like Andrew Bacevich.
I’m curious where the point c at the end, about firms that have violated intellectual property, comes from. Is there a specific geopolitical risk related to IP? Because I remember a big criticism (not the only one) of TPP was that it had a lot of Hollywood protectionist policies like further extending copyright terms and such. So is Hollywood’s interest fundamentally compatible with competing with China, or is it a distraction? Or are we talking about something totally different when referring to IP here?
Technically, *technically*, the Cold War has not been the only ideological geopolitical conflict that the US has faced in its history. The US was born from another such conflict. To quote Jon Meacham, in the mindset of Thomas Jefferson and followers of his movement, the years from "1765 to 1815 were a fifty year war with Britain. Sometimes hot, and sometimes cold, and as ideological as the Cold War". Before you scoff at this comparison, recall that the revolutionaries disliked the economic dependence that the new post-colonial country had on the British trading system, in which the provinces/states exported raw commodities and imported finished goods. Ahem.
But yes, in the US's modern history, over the period in which it has been an economically powerful country, the only extended ideological conflict it has engaged in has been the Cold War against the USSR. A conflict that occurred, rather inherently, without US economic entanglement with that adversary.
Also, yeah, "no massive anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11" is demonstrably untrue. The rise in hate crimes is pretty well documented. And frankly, the insinuation that the Bushie neocons were acting in anything like good faith in regards to Iraq is a very wrong-headed and, really, pernicious idea. They were on record pushing regime change in the 1990s.
I don't agree that this Brands person is a "card-carrying member of the blob", since being unambiguously gung-ho on TPP seems like the Blobbish line, but he's got some analytic blindspots. I don't support U.S. decline, primarily because I think of its negative implications as being domestic and I want the country to be decent and thriving. Brands makes a solid point that the Cold War against the USSR pushed the US to rejuvenate and improve itself (as the unnamed revolutionary cold war against Britain pushed the US towards political development, democratization, and the seeds of import substitution development), but that's not an original insight.
“no massive anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11?” What world is Brands living in? Makes me question his authority on the rest of the topics covered in the interview
Love the comment about Bush/Iraq. The left really gets high on its own supply on that one. The most likely reality is that Saddam either thought he had weapons that he didn't (IE his advisors were lying to him), and therefore anted up to play without realizing he was bankrupt, OR thought he could bluff like the North Koreans had done just a few years earlier, but completely misjudged the emotional temperature of the US and its patience for the same stupid "WMDs for aid" gambit.
Because there simply was no other reason for him to lock out weapons inspectors and play that whole game if he knew he didn't have them or thought the US was REALLY going to invade him over it.
Bush, for his part, totally played himself. It wasn't so much about lying, it was just that he saw what he wanted to see, and bought what Saddam was showing him. [Ed: And because he wanted to do it, he sold it all to the American public. The fact that we never found WMDs doesn't necessarily mean he had to have lied. It just means that at minimum, he was wrong about there being any.]
Anyways, what I really wanted to come say was that I'd be a little cautious of curbing investment in the PLA. Not because I feel like we need to finance their military, but because the more financial links their military elites have with US interests, the more they'll second-guess any dumb move Xi makes.
I am curious as to Hal's recommendation vis-a-vis military strength. I retired from the Military in 2011, have joined up in 1989. I watched the fall of the Iron Curtain, the great draw down, the move to mobile more deployable contingency operations (Middle East).
Military spending is no longer popular. A cold war military is a thing of the past. Interest in military service is down. However, is I detect a sense that Hal thinks we are getting to a point where we have either gone to far with our desire to be relevant compared to our ability to actually project deterrence and strength.
I'm thinking through broader Quincy vs. Blob debates a lot recently, and so far have concluded that...
Crafting an internally coherent foreign policy is hard.
My best strategy to validate any new doctrine is to start with lists of conflicts where my intuitions are strongly in favor or strongly opposed, and test new doctrines against those cases to see if they produce uncomfortable results. Hopefully I can set aside hard cases, but they may be useful checks if the doctrine produces really certain results on them.
I'm pro, for example:
* stopping genocide in the Balkans,
* stopping invasions of Kuwait,
* stopping a mustachioed german who is hellbent on both industrialized genocide AND world domination -- probably the easiest of the easy cases. I've heard there are WWII reservationists* out there, but that seems fringe to me.
Panama ("Just Cause") is a weird case, and the branding for it is especially suspicious! If you separate it out into sub-rationales it maybe becomes easier:
* Panama declares war on the US and begins attacking our forces. Sometimes the other side gets a vote! (We could pushback on inducement, but insofar as this rationale truly holds, if a country just starts killing your people and forces you to respond, I think this a pretty easy case.)
* US wants to police the international drug trade, or arrest a leader because he sells drugs. I think most commenters would agree that this is on the weak end of possible rationales for US involvement.
Panama's a "mixed" case, then there are very, very hard cases. Syria. Pro insofar as you are trying to prevent genocide and one of the worst humanitarian crises of the century, but so, so many Cons: running up against logistical realities, an unclear morally superior successor state, other foreign interests willing to commit to a conflict that could spiral and even worsen the humanitarian issues... those all make this much more difficult to consider.
I think there's some room for conflict in hard cases, so you can provide compellence and deterrence in other hard cases, preventing the need for war more broadly, but that of course flirts with a slippery slope, so acknowledge that's high risk.
I'd be interested in if other commenters have views on wars that should be included in the stable of test cases.
I suspect a lot of people share the same base concerns about human rights or national sovereignty, but that the distinction between different views will often come down to whether or not we trust ourselves to adjudicate when those things are truly at risk, vs. playing into some other base state interest. Often those things are unclear and comingled, which makes this all hard to sort out in real cases.
If anyone (Noah, guest interviewee, other commenters) have thoughts on how to approach this from first principles, at a meta level, as opposed to getting stuck in the object level cases in the current headlines, I think that would be really valuable. Just debating the current situation as it comes up I think pulls on a lot of biases and risks inconsistency. So I'd be very much interested in broader foundational essays on this.
A lot of the American public felt it had been screwed by the trade partnerships before TPP, and it’s hard to deny that the agreements increased inequality in the US. Of course economists simply ran the numbers and assured everyone that these were great deals that would increase the national wealth. They were probably not wrong but they were totally wrong wrt their evil impact on America - leading to the rise of a potent anti-democratic movement. When you bemoan the lack of a TPP agreement I can’t believe it- it’s like you’re willing the rise of Trump. Our capitalist system can’t handle a TPP at this time. Fix that first or our next President will be a stooge of Xi and Putin and Cold War 2 will be over.
There is an underlying assumption with this argument that I find troublesome: America does not have these rivals as much as it is actively making them rivals.
We can and should debate the morality of China's desire to control Taiwan, but Taiwan represents for China, a symbol of their former glory, and its cuddly relationship with the West is not looked upon kindly.
We can and should debate the morality of Russia's desire to invade Ukraine, but Ukraine's decision to join NATO and entrench itself with the EU are not choices Russia is willing to accept.
In the same vein that the USA was very uncomfortable with communist Cuba, and for good reason too.
If you are a great power, you don't want allies of your rival in your neighborhood: imagine if Mexico went communist and started cutting deals with china.
These countries are trying to control their respective regional spheres of influence
The only reason the USA sees this as a threat is because America has always thought the entire world is its sphere of influence.
And I don't need to list the terrible track record that has come out of such 'benovelent imperialism'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
hey noah, you should respond to this video.
This guy Brands is an absolute legend for posting this article on 9/11/2020 (https://www.aei.org/op-eds/trump-ike-and-the-myth-of-the-military-industrial-complex/) about how there is no military-industrial complex, while he was literally on the payroll of that very complex as a fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, funded by Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, US Navy, Royal Air Force, Boeing and so on.
Anyways he is a pretty middling, lightweight scholar (see the bizarre assertions in this interview about no anti-Muslim backlash, e.g., or here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/438677174CA5BE6096C214BA90C3EDAE/S0018246X20000412a.pdf/rethinking_latin_americas_cold_war.pdf), and I do not understand why he has such a platform.
“no massive anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11?” What world is Brands living in? Makes me question his authority on the rest of the topics covered in the interview
Good information, thank you!
Noah, Brands sounds like a card-carrying member of the blob, determined to. prolong U.S. hegemony in the face of a steady decline. in our. role in the world economy and our multi-trillion dollar fiasco trying to bring thee free market and liberal democracy to the Middle East.
Please, do a comparable interview with someone like Andrew Bacevich.
I’m curious where the point c at the end, about firms that have violated intellectual property, comes from. Is there a specific geopolitical risk related to IP? Because I remember a big criticism (not the only one) of TPP was that it had a lot of Hollywood protectionist policies like further extending copyright terms and such. So is Hollywood’s interest fundamentally compatible with competing with China, or is it a distraction? Or are we talking about something totally different when referring to IP here?
Technically, *technically*, the Cold War has not been the only ideological geopolitical conflict that the US has faced in its history. The US was born from another such conflict. To quote Jon Meacham, in the mindset of Thomas Jefferson and followers of his movement, the years from "1765 to 1815 were a fifty year war with Britain. Sometimes hot, and sometimes cold, and as ideological as the Cold War". Before you scoff at this comparison, recall that the revolutionaries disliked the economic dependence that the new post-colonial country had on the British trading system, in which the provinces/states exported raw commodities and imported finished goods. Ahem.
But yes, in the US's modern history, over the period in which it has been an economically powerful country, the only extended ideological conflict it has engaged in has been the Cold War against the USSR. A conflict that occurred, rather inherently, without US economic entanglement with that adversary.
Also, yeah, "no massive anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11" is demonstrably untrue. The rise in hate crimes is pretty well documented. And frankly, the insinuation that the Bushie neocons were acting in anything like good faith in regards to Iraq is a very wrong-headed and, really, pernicious idea. They were on record pushing regime change in the 1990s.
I don't agree that this Brands person is a "card-carrying member of the blob", since being unambiguously gung-ho on TPP seems like the Blobbish line, but he's got some analytic blindspots. I don't support U.S. decline, primarily because I think of its negative implications as being domestic and I want the country to be decent and thriving. Brands makes a solid point that the Cold War against the USSR pushed the US to rejuvenate and improve itself (as the unnamed revolutionary cold war against Britain pushed the US towards political development, democratization, and the seeds of import substitution development), but that's not an original insight.
“no massive anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11?” What world is Brands living in? Makes me question his authority on the rest of the topics covered in the interview
Love the comment about Bush/Iraq. The left really gets high on its own supply on that one. The most likely reality is that Saddam either thought he had weapons that he didn't (IE his advisors were lying to him), and therefore anted up to play without realizing he was bankrupt, OR thought he could bluff like the North Koreans had done just a few years earlier, but completely misjudged the emotional temperature of the US and its patience for the same stupid "WMDs for aid" gambit.
Because there simply was no other reason for him to lock out weapons inspectors and play that whole game if he knew he didn't have them or thought the US was REALLY going to invade him over it.
Bush, for his part, totally played himself. It wasn't so much about lying, it was just that he saw what he wanted to see, and bought what Saddam was showing him. [Ed: And because he wanted to do it, he sold it all to the American public. The fact that we never found WMDs doesn't necessarily mean he had to have lied. It just means that at minimum, he was wrong about there being any.]
Anyways, what I really wanted to come say was that I'd be a little cautious of curbing investment in the PLA. Not because I feel like we need to finance their military, but because the more financial links their military elites have with US interests, the more they'll second-guess any dumb move Xi makes.
After reading this interview I decided to go on a little Hal Brands kick. And came across this article he wrote recently https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2022-01-18/overstretched-superpower
I am curious as to Hal's recommendation vis-a-vis military strength. I retired from the Military in 2011, have joined up in 1989. I watched the fall of the Iron Curtain, the great draw down, the move to mobile more deployable contingency operations (Middle East).
Military spending is no longer popular. A cold war military is a thing of the past. Interest in military service is down. However, is I detect a sense that Hal thinks we are getting to a point where we have either gone to far with our desire to be relevant compared to our ability to actually project deterrence and strength.
I'm thinking through broader Quincy vs. Blob debates a lot recently, and so far have concluded that...
Crafting an internally coherent foreign policy is hard.
My best strategy to validate any new doctrine is to start with lists of conflicts where my intuitions are strongly in favor or strongly opposed, and test new doctrines against those cases to see if they produce uncomfortable results. Hopefully I can set aside hard cases, but they may be useful checks if the doctrine produces really certain results on them.
I'm pro, for example:
* stopping genocide in the Balkans,
* stopping invasions of Kuwait,
* stopping a mustachioed german who is hellbent on both industrialized genocide AND world domination -- probably the easiest of the easy cases. I've heard there are WWII reservationists* out there, but that seems fringe to me.
Panama ("Just Cause") is a weird case, and the branding for it is especially suspicious! If you separate it out into sub-rationales it maybe becomes easier:
* Panama declares war on the US and begins attacking our forces. Sometimes the other side gets a vote! (We could pushback on inducement, but insofar as this rationale truly holds, if a country just starts killing your people and forces you to respond, I think this a pretty easy case.)
* US wants to police the international drug trade, or arrest a leader because he sells drugs. I think most commenters would agree that this is on the weak end of possible rationales for US involvement.
Panama's a "mixed" case, then there are very, very hard cases. Syria. Pro insofar as you are trying to prevent genocide and one of the worst humanitarian crises of the century, but so, so many Cons: running up against logistical realities, an unclear morally superior successor state, other foreign interests willing to commit to a conflict that could spiral and even worsen the humanitarian issues... those all make this much more difficult to consider.
I think there's some room for conflict in hard cases, so you can provide compellence and deterrence in other hard cases, preventing the need for war more broadly, but that of course flirts with a slippery slope, so acknowledge that's high risk.
I'd be interested in if other commenters have views on wars that should be included in the stable of test cases.
I suspect a lot of people share the same base concerns about human rights or national sovereignty, but that the distinction between different views will often come down to whether or not we trust ourselves to adjudicate when those things are truly at risk, vs. playing into some other base state interest. Often those things are unclear and comingled, which makes this all hard to sort out in real cases.
If anyone (Noah, guest interviewee, other commenters) have thoughts on how to approach this from first principles, at a meta level, as opposed to getting stuck in the object level cases in the current headlines, I think that would be really valuable. Just debating the current situation as it comes up I think pulls on a lot of biases and risks inconsistency. So I'd be very much interested in broader foundational essays on this.
* What's the right antonym for blob?
A lot of the American public felt it had been screwed by the trade partnerships before TPP, and it’s hard to deny that the agreements increased inequality in the US. Of course economists simply ran the numbers and assured everyone that these were great deals that would increase the national wealth. They were probably not wrong but they were totally wrong wrt their evil impact on America - leading to the rise of a potent anti-democratic movement. When you bemoan the lack of a TPP agreement I can’t believe it- it’s like you’re willing the rise of Trump. Our capitalist system can’t handle a TPP at this time. Fix that first or our next President will be a stooge of Xi and Putin and Cold War 2 will be over.
Do you publish recordings of your interviews?