Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness

Dwarkesh Patel opens by asking Richard Hanania, president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, to summarize his new book, Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy. Hanania says it has two audiences: international-relations scholars, and general readers interested in American foreign policy. The first two chapters are theoretical and aimed at the academic side; most of the rest tests the argument against American behavior.

His target is the standard assumption in international-relations scholarship that states are rational actors pursuing goals. Rational here does not mean good for the world or consistent with anyone's values, only that state behavior can be understood as goal-seeking. Grand strategy follows from this: diplomatic, economic and military tools are assumed to push in the same direction toward the same ends. Hanania calls this view naive. We do not assume the U.S. government has a grand strategy for immigration, health care or the tax system, so seeing one in foreign affairs is a fallacy of design and goal-focus that we avoid elsewhere.

In the empirical chapters he asks whether grand strategy, or his alternative model based on public choice, better explains U.S. military presence abroad, when the country starts and ends wars, and the sanctions regime. He argues the public-choice model simply works better.

Patel's first objection is that states with incoherent foreign policies should eventually lose to states with cohesive strategies. Hanania answers that this argument is most closely associated with Kenneth Waltz. It may run against the nature of the state, which is large and complicated. Selection might push states toward rationality, but how far is an open question. He adds that much else shapes outcomes besides how states react to one another.

He offers a conjecture he says nobody has raised before. The institutions that favor economic growth, namely decentralization, individual freedom and an open society, may be bad for forming a grand strategy. Interest groups influence policy, citizens care about their own lives more than events abroad, and a limited state cannot enforce its will. A country such as the United States, rich in human capital and institutions, can afford an irrational foreign policy. States with bad foreign policies may therefore still have good growth and so great geopolitical strength.

Patel asks whether this implies that the decline of war has been bad, because war once kept political institutions from becoming sclerotic. Hanania does not say war is good on balance, but he grants that war is a catalyst for change. The world wars expanded the American federal government, which he considers mostly bad but which welfare-state supporters must credit to those wars. The potential for conflict was also part of the Cold War, and without it the Soviet Union might have lasted indefinitely. Change, he adds, can go in a negative direction as well.

The limits of the claim are visible in how Hanania frames it. On Waltz's selection argument he offers possibilities rather than a refutation: the state may be too complicated to be rational, and selection may help but its reach is unsettled. The link between decentralized growth institutions and weak strategy is presented as a possibility, not as an established finding. He also says he does not think the decline of war is bad on balance, so the argument is about trade-offs between peace and institutional vitality, not a defense of war.

Patel asks whether these problems are unique to democracies, since China is centralized yet quarrels with Japan over islands, skirmishes with India over mountain regions, and may have cost overruns on the Belt and Road. Hanania separates two axes: whether a foreign policy is smart or wise, and whether it is coherent. His book concerns coherence only.

On wisdom, he says China's blunders are small next to American investment in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he adds Libya and Syria to the American list. China's military spending is fairly low. On coherence, he agrees that the Chinese system is more coherent and attributes this partly to its not being a democracy. Its grand strategy has largely been to have little foreign policy beyond pushing its weight around in its own region, which he calls natural for a growing state. He uses Lithuania as an example: after a step involving Taiwan that China disliked, China acted against Lithuania, and a goal is usually discernible. A U.S. sanction, by contrast, destroys an economy more totally than anything China does and then ends all dialogue.

Patel suggests China may simply lack the money to waste on debacles yet, and that it may repeat American mistakes once its economy is larger. Hanania answers that coherence is not purely a function of resources. He notes that the British Empire reached peak colonization when Britain was not fully a democracy. Maoist China, very poor, was by his account the largest provider of foreign aid in the world per capita, and gave subsidies to richer countries in Eastern Europe. He also says Russia today overinvests in foreign policy relative to its economy. He believes China, which has caught up with or passed the United States in purchasing-power terms, could do more abroad but chooses not to for now.