Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness

**Richard Hanania** (0:00)
So, there's this idea on the populist right, that we tried libertarianism, and now wokeness has taken over. And I'm like, okay, when did Republicans repeal the Civil Rights Act? 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.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:23)
Today, I'm speaking with Richard Hanania, who is the president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and 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?
Sure.

**Richard Hanania** (0:37)
So the argument of my book is, 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.
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 it's understood in political science, the field of international relations, the idea is that states basically are rational actors. And rational actors is something that 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 can be understood in that context. So basically, the study of grand strategy is a corollary of this.
And the idea is that diplomatic, economic, and military means 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.
There's a fallacy of seeing it designed in international relations, or a goal-focused behavior. And we tend not to make that mistake in other areas. So 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 thinking about ideas and political philosophy. I think 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 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 argued that the public choice model for policy just works better.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:56)
So maybe the unitary actor model is not right right now, but wouldn't be true in the future. So, you know, like the countries that have a fucked up foreign policy, where the whole thing is in shambles and contradicts itself, you know, they'll lose out to the countries that actually have a cohesive national strategy.
And in the long run, the countries that actually do have a crazy grand strategy will win, right?

**Richard Hanania** (3:18)
Yeah. So this is 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, get closer to grand strategies 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 there's 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 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 with things like decentralization, individual freedom, open society, that might be bad for forming a ground 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.