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Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan were cases where lack of state capacity meant that we could not shape outcomes to our desires. This logic would have suggested an equal lack of success in Korea. There were few places on the planet with less state capacity than Korea in 1950. We intervened to stop conquest of the Republic of Korea by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. It took time, and some ugly authoritarianism, but the Republic of Korea was eventually able to develop the state capacity to become a prosperous, democratic society. With the benefit of hindsight, I'd think that both MH and NC would consider US intervention a success. Although it probably didn't look that way in 1965.

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What's missing is an understanding of genetics. Korea had fantastic genetics, so it could develop state capacity so long as it didn't go communist or descend into war.

Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan don't have genetic capacity, so they never had a shot.

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What they had was institutions. Japan was brutal but also effective at bureaucracy. Taiwan inherited the same tradition. The middle east's institutions come from the Ottoman Caliphate.

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Maybe the institution in the ME that should have been most regarded/acknowledged was "foreign expertise", setting the bar rather lower.

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Good genetics can make good institutions.

Bad genetics can't.

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I guess we need NH -- Neocon Humility.

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Part of me would settle for some Neocon creativity. Why do they think we need to replicate the British Parliamentary System all over the Middle East? Maybe try the British Parliamentary System of 1700, with a House of Lords run by wealthy, influential oligarchs, chosen by the state Department. Or just lease the whole country to Erik Prince or whoever. Think outside the box for a change.

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I mean - we did a pretty good job of kicking Grenada's butt, right? We just need to stick to picking on guys our own size like that.

Seriously, though, the "Blame America First" view seems principally to go back to the underdogma - the powerful are always evil, and the powerless are always good. America could be the excellent country it once promised, but could never escape this taint as long as big/powerful.

I guess I need to brush up on the history of Syria. I think of it as self-inflicted. We and Russia dip a toe in now and then.

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Most important statement from the podcast so far: “One of the reasons we might have a different viewpoint is because we have a different set of facts, literally”. Russ Roberts

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He has said that before but I look forward to listening.

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I’ll do a post on this tomorrow.

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Robert Wright prides himself on being full of cognitive empathy, but somehow is never able to imagine a cognitive state in which a bad actor is deterred by the threat of retaliation.

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Feb 1Edited

That's not an uncommon understanding of people's motivation. I was talking to my brother-in-law (retired Army COL) about the Border. He said if we didn't let illegal or asylum-seeking immigrants enter at the border (as opposed to applying from elsewhere) it wouldn't reduce the numbers coming to the border. I didn't ask but it would seem to follow he doesn't think an open border would increase the numbers who show up.

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He yammers about cognitive empathy but in the case if Putin doesn't seem to understand that a human might be motivated the glory of his empire and a desire for conquest.

I haven't listened to him about Palestine, but I would no be surprised by similar blind spots.

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Yeah that is his blind spot... I say this as someone who agrees with him a lot of the time.

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I think you left out here the more realist stripe in the MH tradition, which says the US just shouldn't care so much about how other countries are governed domestically. Like sure, the Vietnamese would be better off without communism but that's their business and bathing them in napalm wasn't going to make things any better.

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1 - Their business? Who is they? Does that include the majority of Vietnamese who have virtually zero say in what type of government they have? What about the ones who are so unhappy they risk leaving on rickety boats?

2 - What happens when they try to undermine the more democratic, more capitalistic governments of their neighbors? Is it still "their business"?

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Yeah there are certainly gray areas here. The smartest view is just that there should be a strong presupposition that the US getting involved tends to make things worse, and that letting countries exist under bad or even despotic government is often less of a human rights disaster than escalating a war. Especially when the faction we'd be backing is itself a military dictatorship, a group with Islamist leanings, or something like that.

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I wouldn't agree with that supposition. Maybe you could argue that when we get involved things get worse. IDK. Either way, what we don't know is how things would have gone if we didn't get involved. The bad outcome might have been even worse.

I'd vote for a little more humility when getting involved.

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I think it's very hard to argue that we have an overall tendency to improve things enough to make it worth the price in blood and money that these interventions usually cost us. Like I'm open to the possibility that the post Iraq drone war was beneficial and one can make a strong case for the war against isis but of course that started in the first place due to our wrongful actions.

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your comment doesn't seem relevant to what I previously wrote.

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1) There isn't enough HBD in foreign policy discussion, and as a result you get a lot of bad logic. I consider Steve Sailers 2003 article arguing that the Middle East lacked the genetic capacity to form a first world society the definitive argument against the Iraq War.

So long as we ignore HBD, I predict a lot of bad decision making in foreign policy.

Lastly, economic growth comes from genetics, peace, and markets (even imperfect markets). Not democracy or human rights or whatever else, even if you think democracy/HR are good or think it helps with things like peace and markets.

2) Unless another entity is threatening your existence (the way Germany and Japan were) then you should generally not try to fight a war with them unless invaded.

The policy of containment was correct during the Cold War. Trying to liberate Eastern Europe via Operation Unthinkable would have been a disaster. Washington was correct to let the Soviets crush the various "springs", and also correct to arm Western Germany and form NATO.

Civil conflicts (Vietnam) are messy for the concept of containment.

3) If you system really is superior then so long as you aren't conquered then you rivals may one day adopt your system, as the Soviets did voluntarily. The Chinese did as well at an economic level.

4) The west should steer clear stating that other peoples system of government are illegitimate and should be taken down, along with actual concrete steps to do so (the intelligence and NGO work that goes into color revolutions, etc).

Convincing foreign powers that we intend to subvert and overthrow them is a great way to get war. If we really belief in #3, we don't need to.

5) Geography matters. While defending Taiwan is geographically possible, it's difficult to know how HK could have been defended.

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Does Steve Sailers' argument about the Middle East really make sense though? There are enclaves of the Middle East (UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait) that do have societies with first world living standards. Sure, that might be entirely because of oil but European societies did not intellectually or technologically surpass the Islamic world until the early modern period (IIRC correctly from Charles Murray in Human Accomplishment). I think there's a better case to be made that the societal restrictions of Islam and the sectarian conflicts that stem from it are the real limitations to state capacity in the region. I don't see how HBD is a better explanation for why the West surpassed the Near East than the fact that the former unshackled itself from the harmful elements of its religion while the latter did not. That isn't even going into the Edward Said/Noam Chomsky type arguments that Western imperialism significantly stunted the development of the region.

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1) I think that its possible for resource rich/tax haven city states with enlightened despots to achieve first world status by hiring high IQ foreigners to build society for them.

This is a good thing compared to the alternative.

It is not scalable to the entire Middle East or the third world more generally. And it requires foreign societies to provide human capital.

I also don't know its longevity, given its so dependent on single individuals and unique circumstances.

2) I think that the genetics of the Middle Ages are not the same as the genetics of the modern world.

Europeans today are smarter than Europeans in the Middle Ages (see Greg Clark). The same is true of Ashkenazi Jews.

People in the Middle East might be dumber than the Middle Ages. Cousin marriage under Islam was bad, and there may actually have worse genetics today then back then.

Or they may have had a very good smart fraction in the Middle Ages but not much genetic depth beyond that. For instance, India has some bright smart fraction but its small and its underclass is vast.

A lot of times when you drill down you find that these societies/races have some very high performing genetically segregated groups but its a tiny portion of the population.

My view on genetics is that strong selection pressures (the kind where half your kids die) can produce meaningful genetic drift over the course of centuries. That's enough to explain human variation but not enough to solve genetic difference in the here and now of a single generation.

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I think you just possibly might get more traction expressing this without reference to HBD. I mean, I realize in a comment section, it's meant, shorthand, as a reality check ... but in general - if it could be expressed as, there are a great diversity of ways of being in the world, and the measure of success is whether a people persist. It will not all look the same, and in a way that is "robust" for humanity at large. Many eggs, many baskets.

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founding

Barry Gewen authored an excellent book on foreign policy in 2020 titled "The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World." Gewen explores how Kissinger's worldview was profoundly shaped by witnessing the rise of the Nazis and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and experiecing how democracy in Weimar Germany enabled Hitler's rise to power.

This placed Kissinger among a group of German-Jewish intellectual émigrés such as Hans Morgenthau, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt who felt alienated from America's upbeat ideology and instead advocated a realistic, "thinking without banisters" approach to foreign policy. In contrast to moralizers, these thinkers saw policymaking as full of uncertainty and inevitable tragedy.

Their goals were limited, such as forestalling nuclear war, not utopian solutions. They accepted the imperfectability of humans and policy, and the reality that foreign policy is usually a choice among least bad options. Gewen's book provides an excellent examination of the differences between the realist and neocon approaches to foreign policy, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. In so doing, Gewen provides a sound framework for evaluating various approaches to the foreign policy challenges that we face today.

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Moral clarity tends to come easiest to those without cognitive humility. I think your perception of innuendo / snotty insinuation speaks to your mindset more than Wright's. Surely better to argue with what he says than suggest he 'really' means something else.

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I am confused, are you saying that you don't think that someone can recognize innuendo or insinuation in conversation? Or that Kling is erroneously seeing innuendo and insinuation where there is none?

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Of course innuendo and insinuation exist, but they don't exist everywhere. If you're quick to see them in some people's comments and not others, be alert that this may be a product of your own bias. Wright has broadcast thousands of words on Israel/Palestine in writing and speech, in that Russ Roberts podcast and many others. There's plenty material out in the open on which you can judge his views and argue with them. Accusations of 'snotty insinuation' are cheap and uncalled for.

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Ok, so your claim is that you don't believe Wright was making insinuations or innuendos at all, and Kling is only claiming to see them because he misunderstood what was being said?

I am surprised here, mostly because you didn't ask Kling what he had in mind when he talked about innuendo and snotty insinuation, which is itself a rather surprisingly strong turn of phrase for Kling, before saying that he is clearly wrong. In effect you are accusing Kling of what you yourself seem to be doing.

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It's really not an abstruse point – Kling smears Wright with a drive-by accusation he doesn't back up. There's just no need to bring insinuation into it when so many words are out in the open.

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I invite you to listen to the podcast. Wright says things like the Anti-Defamation League has the sole purpose of anchoring the Israel lobby. He claims that Israel made up accusations of Hamas atrocities, that avoiding a two-state solution is Israel's deliberate goal as opposed to their coming to that conclusion based on experience, and so on. These are accusations that require elaboration, support and debate. Instead, he just drops them as "asides," leaving no time for them to be challenged.

Maybe in other contexts he takes a more sober approach. But the way he goes about it on this podcast makes me think that on the issue of Israel his rationality has deserted him. Sort of the way it has deserted him on the Kennedy assassination issue.

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I did listen to all of it – I thought the only fault of a laudable and worthwhile conversation was that it's such a big issue for them to cover in that time, so you could tell both Russ and Bob were having to make points in passing, any one of which could have split off into a separate 2-hour conversation. (I heard Bob apologising for that exact dynamic at least once.) I certainly didn't hear him say anything like what you characterise, which is maybe why you have to use language like insinuate / innuendo in your post.

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While I agree that maybe a footnote pointing out an example of what he is talking about might have been a good idea, saying that he really didn't like Wright's behavior on EconTalk in passing while writing about something else on which Wright talked isn't terrible. At some point one has to limit what they expand upon at any given moment.

Not to mention that fact that many words being out in the open doesn't imply that one doesn't talk with innuendo and insinuation, and largely for the same reason. People love to imply things they don't have time to discuss, or wouldn't like to be caught saying openly in text or recordings. Sometimes it is unintentional, and sometimes it isn't.

And again, you still haven't asked Kling just what he meant. Why aren't you more interested in clearing up the disagreement, instead of chiding him for making a statement he doesn't elaborate on to your satisfaction while not asking for elaboration?

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The post title is personalised towards Wright and then the only mention of him is in the paragraph about the Russ Roberts conversation. And you admit the language gets 'surprisingly strong' at that point – I'm sure I'm not the only one who found it jarring. If you're going to name the post after him and use that kind of intemperate language , you ought to offer something more than just casual abuse, then waiting for someone to 'ask for elaboration' in the comments.

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I get your point that we tend to hear the worst points in those we chose not to like and the best in those we do like. I think that is a worthwhile point to make but I also think you've pulled that thread WAY too far.

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Stand up for Hong Kong? That would have been about as good a move as standing up for Czechoslovakia in 1968... Something not even the most rabid NC of the time wanted to do.

You don't test the territorial integrity of a nuclear armed near peer country. That's a pretty basic rule of foreign policy.

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Feb 1Edited

Standing up for HK doesn't have to reach the level of military confrontation. It could have been something along the lines of stronger dialogue. Maybe something economic. And it doesn't have to be something with more than a faint chance of success. It doesn't have to be about winning. It can be about being on the right side.

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Should have been free visas for anyone. But of course it's impossible to talk about immigration in any productive way these days.

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Visas or green cards? Either way it's an interesting idea.

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Visas with a path to permanent residency

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Given the number of US bases worldwide in multiple countries and the CIA's regular interference in elections around the world, it is hard not to conclude that the US is an empire rather than a nation-state. This brings the benefits of the Pax America, likely at unsustainable cost, particularly with multi-national corporations rationally shipping jobs (and pollution and greenhouse gases) off to China. The frame of empire may reduce the applicability of the MH v. NC dichotomy.

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I suppose I am in the Neocon camp here, but maybe AK mischaracterise us. For example I don't think there's anything West should have done to help Hong Kong, except use it as a justification for a more China unfriendly policy - generally, which we should have regardless.

The reason is there events didn't provide a reason to take on the enormous risk and cost of a serious intervention.

By contrast Iraq and Afghanistan were not invaded to create democracy. Rightly or wrongly to America wanted to smash an existing regime for it's own reasons. Democracy promotion was a stretch goal resulting from the aftermath.

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I suppose I am in the Neocon camp here, but maybe AK mischaracterise us. For example I don't think there's anything West should have done to help Hong Kong, except use it as a justification for a more China unfriendly policy - generally, which we should have regardless.

The reason is there events didn't provide a reason to take on the enormous risk and cost of a serious intervention.

By contrast Iraq and Afghanistan were not invaded to create democracy. Rightly or wrongly to America wanted to smash an existing regime for it's own reasons. Democracy promotion was a stretch goal resulting from the aftermath.

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I didn't know of Wright before your post. As i listened to him talk I wanted to dislike him. Maybe that's why I found him less eloquent and less compelling than Russ. What I didn't hear was him being unfair to Israel or Jews. Yes, he thinks what they are doing is bad for Israel but that is something EVERYONE should be considering as a possibility. As for his ADL comment, I didn't hear anything but him stating an opinion he believes many liberals hold. Maybe you have reason to believe he holds it too but I don't see that in this conversation.

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I like the way you separate the 2 viewpoints - MH & NC - this seems like a good classification for American interventions. I wonder if the taxonomy applies internationally.

However I find the Japan/Germany examples unconvincing - in hindsight its easy to assign state capacity & culture as factors that caused those stories to end well.

So maybe your main point is that leaders need to have the ability to recognize the 2 forks & consciously choose which way to go when confronted with a situation vs taking a default route (per idelogical prefernce). Is that so?

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yes, although a commenter's Korea example caught me up short. He points out that we might have written off South Korea in 1950 as never being able to develop state capacity. Yet they did.

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I don't know enough about Korean history so I don't know what "writing off South Korea" meant in real terms. Presumably North Korea (the other half) had similar state capacity & culture at that time - not sure we would call NK development a triumph of any sort (other than N Korean propaganda) :)

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Charles Moore's biography of Margaret Thatcher covers the UK-China negotiations over the transfer of Hong Kong to China. They agreed on the formula 'one country, two systems,' but given the nature of China's government, the formula was obviously a fig leaf. At least the preexisting system lasted much longer than the one we established in Afghanistan. It seems to me, however, that you contradict yourself here, because as far as I can tell, you support the outsourcing of manufacturing to China under the rubric of 'free trade' and 'globalization.' Arguably, China would have developed anyway, but we facilitated the process by allowing China to join the WTO (even though it didn't meet all the criteria), and by making China's growth more rapid than it otherwise would have been, which in turn enabled China to build up its military power. I'm not sure we could have done anything to stop the calamity, but it seems to me we contributed to it with our trade policy towards China, or at least helped the calamity happen sooner rather than later.

I couldn't stomach reading all of Smith's interview with neocon Sarah Paine. Addressing all the internal contradictions would take too long. With regard to the excerpt in your post, whatever Putin's motives were for invading Ukraine, it wasn't because 'democracies are not interested in territorial expansion but in economic growth,' and therefore that Putin regarded the 'high living standards in democracies as an indictment and mortal threat' to Russia. Whatever Russia's flaws, living standards are much higher in Russia than in Ukraine, and indeed, Ukraine was poorer at the start of the conflict than when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 (!). Had Ukraine (democracy or not) indeed focused on economic growth and raising the living standards of Ukrainian citizens, rather than exacting revenge for perceived historical grievances against Russia (which seems to be the driving motivation of Ukrainian nationalists who represent a small but influential minority in Ukraine), the conflict might have been avoided.

Finally, I didn't listen to the Wright-Roberts podcast, but I have always found him to be snide, which is why I can't stomach listening to him.

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Noah Smith has great post on the same topic: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-afghanistan-occupation-and-the

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