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Richard Hanania

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59
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2022-02-24
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2022-02-24
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  1. “So, yeah, we should be careful not to say having a grant strategy is better or smarter in some ways, just with the question that I address in the book is whether it's coherent. Whether China, so we can understand China in comparison to the US on these two axes, whether it's smart or wise versus whether it's coherent, whether it's smarter-wise, which I think your question was getting at. I mean, China's blunders and having squabbles with Japan over a few islands. I mean, if you compare that to the US investment in Afghanistan or Iraq, I mean, there's really, we're not really once to talk about foreign policy blunders. I mean, the Chinese even spending on the military is pretty low. I mean, there's nothing that compares to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. So we have Blunder after blunder. And whether it's a Chinese, but whether the Chinese system has more coherence in form.”

    2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “More is an accelerant and a sort of catalyst for change, and if you think we need a lot of change, maybe you might distress seeing that the decline of war over time, but change can also go in a negative direction too.”

    2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I mean, so you know, there's not a war is on balance bad, but are there good things we can say for war sort of as far as historical development goes? I think that depending on your politics, if you look at World War I and World War II, a lot happened for the expansion of the American federal government. And I think that's mostly been bad. But if somebody thinks that's good, if you're a big supporter of the welfare state and sort of the centralization of power in Washington, you have to credit World War I and World War II. I think that's clear from the historical record. So unquestionably war leads to changes. The potential for war probably was part of the Cold War and eventually the Soviet Union collapsed if there was no potential for any kind of conflict there, who knows that maybe the Soviet Union could have existed forever. So unquestionably,”

    2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “And it can afford to have a sort of irrational foreign policy. There's actually one possibility is that states that tend to have good institutions for economic growth, things like decentralization, individual freedom, an open society, that might be bad for forming a growing strategy for international relations because you can have interest groups influence foreign policy and people are worried about their own lives rather than what's going on abroad and the state is limited and can't really enforce its will. So this is a possibility that nobody's brought up before, but perhaps there is some kind of tension there where states with bad foreign policies will tend to have good economic growth and therefore a lot of geopolitical strength.”

    2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, so this is, we actually, one of the arguments for how you get rationality that I take issue with. I think this is most closely associated with international relations theorist Kenneth Waltz. So there's a few things you can say about this, right? So it might just go against the nature of the state, right? Maybe the state is such a big and complicated thing that maybe you get closer to rationality, you get closer to grand strategy through a sort of a selection process, but it's still an open question how close you get. And the other thing is I would say that there's a lot else going on in the world beyond how states react to one another. So, you know, there's, you know, the origins of economic development are a complicated thing and a state can have a country like the United States can have a lot going for it as far as human capital, as far as institutions, and do very well economically. And then, you know, just”

    2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “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 grad strategy or a theory based on public choice, which I present as an alternative model? Does that explain things like when the US troop presence is abroad when we start and end various wars, the American sanctions regime? So major parts of American foreign policy. And I argue that the public choice model of foreign policy just works better.”

    2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Tend to be put towards the same goals. They're all basically moving in the same direction. And I think this view of understanding foreign policy is sort of naive. My main argument 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, with regards to health care, with regards to tax system. It's sort of a fallacy of seeing it designed in an international kind of a design in international relations or kind of sort of goal focused behavior. And we tend not to make that mistake in other areas. The first two chapters are basically the theoretical case for why a lot of the ways we look at international relations is wrong, that people are interested in academic works, they're interested in sort of thinking about ideas and political philosophy. I think people will.”

    2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Sure. So the argument in my book is it's 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. So the way that academics tend to study foreign policy, and this is a simplification, but if you're going to have to generalize about the way sort of it's understood in political science, the field of international relations, the idea is that states basically are rational actors and rational actors, and something what they do is necessarily good for the world or whether their values are consistent with other people's values, but basically that states seek certain goals and their behavior could be understood in that context. So basically, the study of grant strategy is sort of a sort of corollary of this. And the idea is that diplomatic, economic, and military...”

    2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So, like, there's this idea on the populist right that we tried libertarianism and now wokeness to state you're over. And I'm like, okay, when did Republicans repeal the Civil Rights Act? Like, when did that happen? When did they defund public education? No, you actually haven't done anything close to libertarianism. And now you're making libertarianism the scapegoat for all these negative trends.”

    2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source