 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our guest today is Justin Logan, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. Let's start off with labels. The one that gets thrown at libertarians all the time is we're isolationists when it comes to foreign policy. Is there any truth to that? Sure. So it depends on what you mean by isolated, right? So the historian Walter McDougall always talks about the difference between being isolated as a condition and being isolationist, right? So just geographically, historically, the United States has been isolated. As has been pronounced before, it has weak-friendly neighbors to the north and south and fish to the east and west. And that's a different condition than obtained in continental Europe, in the modern era that obtained in East Asia, et cetera. So geographically, the United States is isolated. The origin of the term isolationist, it was actually coined by Alfred there Mahan, a T. Mahan, who was a big naval expansionist and an advocate of the early American dalliance with empire in the Spanish-American war. And he used it to sort of smear. It was always initially deployed and has always subsequently been deployed as a smear against people who favor fewer wars than the person leveling the charge. And then it took on a particular salience and a particular connotation after the 1930s when lots of Americans were slow to recognize the gravity of the threat posed, not just by Nazi Germany, but by Imperial Japan, obviously. And so the term care is freighted with this baggage. I don't know anybody who refers to himself as an isolationist, right? So am I an isolationist? I stopped beating my wife months ago and don't refer to myself as being an isolationist. What we do do is favor what one of our colleagues, Ted Carpenter, is called strategic independence. You can come up with, I mean, libertarianism itself is not a very pretty word and I don't have a pretty word for my foreign policy vision. But we do favor a certain detachment from being deeply enmeshed in international politics, having a sort of activist foreign policy, trying to use the American state to remake world politics, remake the politics of other countries in our image. And so there's sort of a two-step question there that we agree, as most people do, that the most vital function of the American government is to provide security for citizens of that government. But just as an empirical matter, we think that that's easier to do than most people in town believe. And as a second-order consideration, libertarians were always very wary of things that consolidate state power. And obviously this is a sort of phenomenon that's probably familiar to listeners, but wars throughout history really have tended to consolidate power in the government. There's what Bob Higgs is called the ratchet effect, where governments accumulate significant powers and then when the crisis or emergency is over, the ratchet never clicks back to the initial position, but some of those powers that it accumulated during the crisis remain. And so concentrations of executive power, tax authority, regulatory authority, et cetera, have come with war and crises. And so we think that the government should fight wars in instances where the security of the United States is threatened, but we think that that's rarer than most people do. And as a second-order consideration, it has all these pernicious effects on American politics that are particularly looked to scan on by libertarians. Has the concern about this ratchet effect declined over time as the nature of war has changed? Because it used to be so we had things like World War II, which was this huge mobilization and just this enormous enterprise versus the smaller kind of bombing campaigns and limited number of troop engagements that we see today. Do those sorts of things still have a ratchet effect if all we're doing is dropping a handful of bombs? Well, you know, to put that question differently, it seems to me is to ask how much further could the ratchet click, right? So a lot of the larger conventional engagements, we still have built up bureaucracies and costly government programs that remain. And you're quite right that the sort of limited engagement bombing from afar wars of the present day have fewer of those sorts of pernicious effects. I think they've accumulated over the past 120 years now collectively. But I do think that particularly if you look at, you know, claims of government power, claims of executive authority, I mean, you know, rewind 20 years and say that the president of the United States will claim for himself the power to unilaterally assassinate an American citizen with next to no oversight from either the legislature or the judiciary, people would say, well, that's a crazy thing. The president can't do that. Well, it turns out that in these claimed exigent circumstances, presidents can get away with those sorts of things. So I think you're quite right that, you know, we're not going to have a Tennessee Valley authority or some sort of, you know, 1940s, 1950s era interstate highway system. You know, I mean, those sorts of things are more or less passe, but I do think that the argument that governments expand in a variety of ways under circumstances of crises still obtains. You know, some libertarians would say that even acknowledging the need for national defense or let's just say the possibility of foreign wars is going over the line that libertarianism demands pacifism at some level. What would you respond to that charge? Right. I always like to get attacked from the left or if that's the left, I don't know what right or left, but I always like to get questions from that point of view. I think I'm – at the point that pacifists are – that I'm enemy number one on the pacifist hit list, if you will, is a point at which American foreign policy, American security policy has changed. I think philosophically – look, pacifists get kind of a bad rap. I think that there's a perfectly respectable though wrong philosophical case for pacifism. I think that the term pacifist has become an epithet. There's a very noble tradition of Christian pacifism that I think has even some overlap with a lot of libertarian concerns. I'm not a pacifist. I sort of a Christian sellout, I guess, in that respect. I buy the just war arguments. I just think if my view of when those criteria are met is a much higher standard that's rarely met, but we could go down the why are you not a pacifist. I mean, at the risk of getting too deeply enmeshed in that I'm not a pacifist. I think that as a philosophical position, it has a lot to be said for it, but I don't share the premises. You mentioned just war, which is a term that gets used a lot, just war theory. Can you explain that to us? People aren't familiar with it? Sure. One, not a legal scholar, but basically, I mean, it grew out of really Christianity in large part. The position in the early church was pacifist, clearly. Even over a millennium, I should say, and a half, there was sort of work and scholars were working on this question of, well, isn't violence in defense sometimes justified? Obviously, the two sorts of questions that are posed in the context of just war theory involve the justice in going to war, the justice of a particular war or endeavor, and then the justice of the means with which the war is conducted. So the Latin terms just ad bellum and just in bello. So the sorts of, for example, one of the questions about justice in the conduct of war would be like Abu Ghraib, right? You could say, did that violate just war principles? Whether or not the war itself may have been justifiable. So anyway, this was a way that Christians generally in the world today are not pacifists, owes a lot to do, owes a lot, I should say, to just war theory and the innovations that took place several centuries ago. I was trying to get an idea of what the principle would be because, as you know, foreign policy creates a lot of inner libertarian fighting. What would you say has to be the most, or maybe not has to, in your opinion, is the most basic view on foreign policy that is required of libertarian of any type? Well, I feel odd setting out litmus tests, but I will do so as commanded. I think lots of libertarians, let me just sort of psychoanalyze a little bit first and then I'll give you some firmer principles. I think lots of libertarians are uncomfortable culturally with anti-war arguments. I think that Medea Benjamin and the Code Pink people, Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders are just not people that libertarians culturally or as a general ideological commitment hold in high esteem. I don't mean to say, well, it's just these knuckle-dragging Neanderthals that hate the left and therefore, if the right's for war, they're for war, but I do think that in their defense, lots of the arguments that are made against wars are dumb. So, you know, that even if you take the tiny constituency of people in Washington, D.C. who oppose lots of wars, we alienate lots of those people because we argue with them and point out that there are arguments against the wars that we're also against are dumb arguments. So, I think there's a certain amount of disagreement with people who are against the wars and not sort of starting from sort of zero-based accounting. I think as a general proposition libertarians should be very suspicious of the sorts of claims that the American government makes to justify wars. And this isn't just Iraq, but I do think that, you know, the pro-Iraq war libertarians and many of them have, very publicly, probably more publicly than I would have sort of reckoned with this. How did this happen? And even in the current campaign against the Islamic State, there was again someone with whom many listeners may not have much in common culturally. There was a good piece by Glenn Greenwald and one of his colleagues about the extraordinary slipperiness and rhetorical chicanery that led up to the claims of necessity of that war. And he sort of followed the bouncing ball of this new group, Khorasan, which was like the really amped up al-Qaeda and these guys were worse than al-Qaeda in the Islamic State. And there was an imminent plot that had been hatched and we needed to go in and start bombing so that we could interdict that plot. And this just sort of all fell apart on scrutiny. And so I think that part of the problem and what is, I think, a libertarian point is that lots of the information about dangers posed to American citizens comes from people who are invested in there being lots of dangers to American citizens. And that's not to say that there are never dangers to American citizens and it's also not to say that people who are talking about the array of threats facing the United States are acting in bad faith. But there's a certain amount of sort of intellectual path dependence that happens there. Lots of people who become prosecuting attorneys think that crime is really bad and don't like to hear people say, you know, I think crime actually isn't that big of a deal and we're throwing too many people in jail. They find that as they take that as an affront and understandably so. Almost a personal attack, yeah. Exactly. And so I think that in analogous, you know, people who become prosecuting attorneys, there's a sort of selection effect. They think crime is a big deal. And as they see actual murderers and actual rapists on a day-to-day basis, that further perpetuates that belief. And so people … And also, if they became a prosecuting attorney, that probably means that they think it's, or it could mean they think it's a bigger deal than other things that are also a big deal. Absolutely. And so people are revealing, you know, what they're concerned about and there just isn't a lot of career opportunity to go into the national security bureaucracy and point out that the threat of the day isn't that big of a threat. It's in no one's interest to pay such a person. And so you get together a bunch of people who have a general bias or a general disposition toward belief that threats or numerous and American action in the world is necessary. And then there's this sort of tunnel vision where that's the premise of most defense programs, it turns out. So people sort of rarely push back. You know, the perverse thing is you'll see a lot of people at the end of their careers, mid-level people, GS15s, GS16s, who come out and they're a little cranky and they're a little old. And they say, you know what, it was all really a crock. And by that point, they're a little cranky and they're a little old. Some people might say that's why they say that, Justin. But, you know, they're not the best advocates for that position. And so I think libertarians in particular should have a view of sort of the structure of the national security bureaucracy and how that influences information that comes to them about threats and policies and wars. It seems to me that if you look at this town and the people who go into either the government side and then maybe go to a think tank or some sort of NGO, and a lot of times these think tanks get a lot of prestige from pulling someone from. So if it's an economic side, someone who was on the housing bureau or someone who was working at the Fed. But at the Fed, there are people who work on, you know, who I think both sides of an issue. There are people who are always pushing a bubble or talking about the other side, looking at the data. It's hard to imagine pulling someone from the Pentagon into a think tank position who is anti-war or anti, not even anti, like slightly more even skeptical about military, skeptical about spending more money on the military. It's hard to imagine any of those people coming out of that establishment with that viewpoint. That's right. So Les Gelb, who is now the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, but at the time was the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote an article in 2008 or 2009 about what went wrong with the media and the lead up to the Iraq war, how we all got here. And so he's sort of beating his breast about his own support for the war and says that, you know, his own support for the war was based on this sort of, I forget the exact formulation he used, but the way to obtain and maintain credibility in the national security establishment in Washington is to support war. And he sort of felt these pressures and that explains a big part of why he supported the war. This guy's the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, right? So if you're a 29-year-old intern at foreign affairs or, you know, a lowly person toiling away in the bowels of the Pentagon, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations says he can't speak out because he's afraid of the structural pressures in the community. Imagine, you know, the median mid-level person, there's really no pressure and you might blow up your own career. So without, you know, kissing the rear ends of Cato donors too much, you know, this is sort of a unique place in town where people get paid to call BS on a lot of the stuff that goes on. And that makes us unpopular in lots of ways. But there was almost nobody in town who got the Iraq war right and my bosses who were here at the time did, and that would account for something. When is it appropriate to go to war? I mean, there's the obvious instance of a foreign army on American soil or someone sending bombs at us right now, but outside of those sorts of eminent threats, when is it okay to use military force? That's sort of the central question, I think. What's interesting to me about it is the extent to which we've needed to draw up more and more elaborate theories connecting events overseas to national security here at home to justify wars. So people talk about, you know, why the sort of the framers view of war and peace doesn't apply to the contemporary age because the world's changed so much. We have trade and the Internet and nuclear weapons and things like that. So there's sort of folksy, pastoral, naive beliefs about how the United States can be secured don't apply in the present era. There were multiple European empires mucking around in the Western Hemisphere in North America at the time the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were written. The White House was burned to the ground during the war of 1812. Spain still owned Mexico for a while. Correct. The British were in Canada. And these were people who were talking about what were their big concerns? We don't want to have a standing army. These were people who did deal with proximate conventional armies masked on the border sorts of threats. They didn't have a standing army array. On their borders were empires compared to the lowly 13 colonies and still they didn't want a standing army. Correct. And they sort of grudgingly went along with a small navy. So I think you hear that argument about well whatever the founders thought way back when is one thing but the world has changed. Yes, it's changed and it's gotten a lot better. Trevor mentioned nuclear weapons. I think nuclear weapons are very, very useful for doing a limited number of things up to and including preventing anybody from burning the White House to the ground. So when is military force justified? I think in almost any circumstance in 2014 is going to require some more or less elaborate theory about how some event unfolding overseas affects the United States here at home. And people in Washington hate the word theory. The political scientist Alexander George once wrote that people's eyes glaze over when you even say theory in Washington. But we need to pick at those theories. Right? We need to figure out. So we had in Afghanistan, we had to surge in Afghanistan because the problem was that al-Qaeda could conceivably establish a safe haven in Afghanistan. And that would lead in an undetermined sort of way to terrorist dominoes falling on our shores. And so one of the things that we regularly asked was well flesh out that theory. How would that work? Right? The 9-11 plot was hatched in Hamburg, Germany. I don't think we would call it a safe haven. Does terrorism really need a landlock desolate location with limited infrastructure to plan terrorist attacks? Or is that actually worse for terrorists than living in a place, for example, that may have limited state control but existing infrastructure? How central is Afghanistan as a safe haven conceivably for terrorists who would seek to attack the United States? These are really skunk at the Garden Party sorts of questions when you come into these debates and start asking these sorts of questions. And so I think that there are theories that you could explain, for example, why a particular terrorist group is plotting an attack and needs to be interdicted. I don't know if I would even deign to call that a war if you sort of have a limited strike against a terrorist group. And I think the broader question about – and to reveal maybe before too early, I guess. My view is that if you want to cause a lot of trouble in international politics, you want to have a big powerful state behind you. And so my old-fashioned sensibilities lead me to be wearier of big-ish, powerful-ish states than they do religious cults or corporations or ideological movements. And so I do think that the old realist trope is about preventing a Eurasian hegemon. We wouldn't want – Realist – can you define that term as its important one? Sure. So in general, in international relations, there are three schools of thought. There is realism, liberalism, and social constructivism, which – Marxism used to be a thing, but that's – again, we don't want to go down that rabbit hole. Realism holds that power is what matters in international politics, that if you want to understand how states behave, it's the desire to maintain power, to maintain their autonomy against other states, and that states are the principal actors in international politics. Further realists talk about anarchy in international politics, which may be of interest to listeners of this podcast. And what that means, again, is not the negative – oh, it's anarchy, but rather a more coherent political theory term. They talk about that in international politics, you can't call 911. There's no sovereign in international politics. In the United States, in theory, as we've found out, sometimes not in practice, you can appeal to the sovereign. You can appeal to the state if your neighbor is in your house setting fire to it or stealing your things. There's a higher authority. There's some sort of political hierarchy there. Realists point out that in international politics, there is no nothing above the nation-state. So you have all these egoistic nation-states seeking their own well-being and their own survival, and so they compete with one another. And so it's a very power-centric, and I think – maybe we want to talk about this – it shares some sympathies with libertarianism. It's wary of concentrated power. It tends to think that concentrated power leads to reckless policies, et cetera. But if you want to talk about realism, that's about power. It's about state-seeking self-preservation in an anarchic environment that doesn't involve a sovereign. So realists talk about America's main abiding interest is preventing a Eurasian hegemon. This is to say preventing one political unit, probably a nation-state, from dominating and really controlling politically the economic and military power of the Eurasian landmass. And so this, obviously, the best analogs for this are the best examples of this were fears about Nazi Germany. I think that would have been really bad in American security, conceivably squaring off against a German empire that included France, conceivably a sort of Finlandized Great Britain. You know, you could tell a story about how that would be something that would have grave direct security implications for the United States. And then in the Cold War, of course, that fear shifted to the idea of Soviet domination of Eurasia. So I agree with that. I just think that it's a problem that does most of the work itself, that solves itself for most of its part. And so that gets into, you know, some other things. But I think that from a sort of state-on-state consideration is what my sort of when you start thinking about the use of military force. What about humanitarian interventions? I mean, there are instances where the United States is not being threatened in any way, but there are people being slaughtered overseas and no one else seems willing to help them. Should we just stand back and let that thing continue? Right. So I think this is a good place for me to be heretical as well. So what I've said here before would lead you to believe that my answer would be yes. You know, it's not about protecting the security of the United States. I think that has something to be said for it theoretically. My view in practice is that you could conceive of a humanitarian intervention that I would support. So for example, this business with the Yazidi population in Iraq being sort of stranded up on this Sinjar mountain range. People were talking about, you know, isn't that something that's pretty easy, that's pretty cheap, that would save conceivably tens of thousands of lives at a minimal cost, et cetera, et cetera. And so I don't have a very good response. That certainly isn't something that gets my blood pressure up, the idea that we would do something like that. The problem is that the tendency in the American national security community is to make everything about us, right? Everything is about through whatever elaborate Rube Goldberg theory that gets it back to our national security. That population that's stranded over there is about our well-being here at home. It's about leadership or if our credibility is on the line or something like that. And that tends to influence and have a pernicious effect on how we think about it. So if it were me, God forbid, imagine I were president and there was something that I thought that the military brass was saying, we can do this, it's pretty cheap, we're not going to get sucked into a quagmire and I think it would do some good. The way you want to talk to the American people about that is to say, look, this isn't about us. It's not about our national security. It's a completely philanthropic thing. There are a bunch of people being killed. We think that we can stop them from being killed at a minimal cost and we don't want to get more deeply involved in the politics that contributed to this sort of situation. Support me on that. And I think that is a different pitch to the American people than what you normally hear about a particular humanitarian intervention. I don't think I've ever heard that. I think there's a reason because presidents that want to do things know that they need to sex up the sales case and to present it as something that's about national security. I also think that we tend, in these cases, the old line about when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, it's a dumb line, but it's not totally off base. We tend to view these as military problems. No, they're political problems, right? The old Klaus Witzian trope about the continuation of politics by other means. That's what war is. We got here somehow. And so there was a good article in Foreign Affairs in 1994 by a guy at Columbia called Richard Betts called the Delusion of Impartial Intervention. And this was very true in the 1990s when the Clinton administration was doing this sort of stuff. These were sort of just technocratic problems. You just need to take out the military leadership. Like Kosovo and Kosovo, the whole wars in the Balkans, Somalia, et cetera. And so the question is, can you do a humanitarian intervention recognizing the underlying political dynamics and without being sucked into the underlying political dynamics and taking sides, right? So that's another consideration that you have is if you're taking money by force from American citizens to save a foreign population, are you making those American citizens enemies by fighting in a civil war? And that's, again, sort of loading the question against yourself if you're pushing for intervention in these circumstances. But, you know, not to be goo goo about it, but you sort of owe people not just that you're conscripting money from them and sending it to people that are not governed by the United States, but also concerns about taking sides in foreign civil wars is a political act. It involves American citizens in another country's politics. Well, think about how the Confederacy spent a lot of this American civil war trying to get Britain involved. That would have been them intervening in our politics. And if they would have become involved, I imagine the people in the North would probably continually hate Britain to this day if it would have ended with a split nation. Some of us still call it perfidious Albion, but that's a separate story. But that's right. So it's the lack of candor, I think, that makes me so squeamish about humanitarian intervention more than the principle. The fact of the matter is we do have this enormous military establishment. There are many more pernicious things I could see it being put to use to than the sort of hypothetical, low-hanging humanitarian fruit. Or, for example, there's the business of the tsunami relief, I should say, in Southeast Asia several years ago. That, I think, has been oversold. People say, oh, we got great PR out of that, et cetera. It turns out it was totally ephemeral, right, that in the matter of a year, I think even less, that huge rush of public support for the United States ebbed because the immediate nice thing that we were doing went away. And people said, well, I'm still ambivalent about the United States. But those are not the things that really get my blood up and get me nervous. But I do think that you can certainly make a theoretical case that taking money by threat of force from American citizens to send them for tsunami relief in Southeast Asia is something that conceptually sits uneasily with libertarianism. Do you think that the inability to, or out of the right word, we didn't intervene in the Rwanda genocide was one of the reasons because no one was able to tie that back to tell the story you were talking about. If it's in the Middle East, you can always, Americans know generally what that is, and we can always say oil and Israel and all these things are in interest. You say Rwanda, we're not exactly sure. So the only way it could have been sold is we should help these people, but it's not really in anyone else's interest, any of our interests at all. It's an interesting question, and I do intuitively think that there's something to sort of, I mean, you hear Africanists talk about this a lot, the dark continent. There's just sort of this, it's not in the front of many Americans' minds. And you could even draw an analogy about that to Darfur, although I would like to think that it was a slight recognition of the underlying political realities that led us to stay out of that one. But I do think that there's something to this, again, perennial Africanist complaint that Africa is just sort of over there in the American mind and it doesn't have the oil, the Israel, the looming Chinese menace reified in the American mind and so they have to make these Google arguments about, you know, foreigners are being killed and that's bad and people sort of yawn and change the channel. So again, I'm not an expert on that question, but I'm sympathetic, I think, to what you were suggesting. I'm curious about the source of the kind of constant saber-rattling that we see from typically people on the right and from conservatives and neoconservatives. I mean, they often, they speak in this language if it's in America's interest or they talk about these enormous threats that groups like ISIS pose to us. Is the disagreement there then between, say, you and the Fox News hosts just about whether these stories about the line between whatever is happening there and American security are accurate, whether the empiricals play out or is there something deeper going on there? Well, so maybe Fox News hosts are not the best proxy for this discussion, but I'll... Foreign policy establishment. People who are more hawkish than I am on the right. How about that? So I think it depends on who you're talking about. So as a guy who spends most of his waking hours grinding his teeth about the latest things that the neocons are up to, I think it's actually an interesting philosophical school of thought. And I think if you look at what, for lack of a better term, we could call first-generation neocons, the Norman Podhorns, the Irving Crystals, Daniel Bell, et cetera. They have a view of politics, not international politics, but American politics or politics more generally, that I think lent itself to national greatness conservatism or something like it. And it's basically an sort of anti-rationalist, anti-liberal view of politics, right? And that's that in the absence of some overweening national purpose that creates centripetal forces to bring this fractious polyglot, polity together will all kill each other or something. That there are all of these centrifugal forces pulling apart society and the libertarian idea that a liberal society in which people are able to pursue happiness as they best see fit just doesn't do it, it's not enough. And so you have to have these unifying purposes and the big enemy for them is the sort of rationalist liberal view because they're going to get rid of these centripetal forces and just let the things spin out of control. And there's been a lot of work done on this by a guy named Michael Williams and Brian Schmidt and it's a little heady in political theory but I'm on your guys podcast so I can talk about this. I think it's a really interesting philosophical disconnect with the sort of high church neocons of you, the sort of the political theorists. And now the person on Fox News would be like, what? I mean, it would have no idea what we were just talking about. But I think the connection between that view of politics and the constant warmongering is that what it means to be an American nationalist has changed. And I think that there are really two schools of conservative nationalism. And one holds that the world is irretrievably flawed and corrupt and for the United States to be exceptional, for the United States to be great, it needs to prevent itself from becoming contaminated in, let's say at the founding, the intrigues of Europe. So you heard a lot of this in the founding fathers that... The Monroe Doctrine type of thing too. All of you stay out. I mean not becoming like Europe. The American political project was supposed to be something different, it was supposed to be a new Zion, etc. But one big component of that was that we could chart a different course because of our isolation. We didn't have to go the route of centralization and bureaucratization that the European states, particularly continental states, had gone because of this opportunity. And so that's why you hear all of the urgent warnings about staying out of the intrigues of Europe because that sort of political behavior led to the sorts of states that the founders saw emerge in Europe and saw those as particularly inclined to war. Exactly, antithetical to liberty, etc. That vision of conservative nationalism, the sort of contamination view, I think is almost dead. That's unfortunate because it's sort of the best nationalist impersonation I can do. But the new version of American nationalism is that the world is irretrievably flawed and corrupt and we must make it like us or else become like it. So it's the sort of antithesis of the original view. And that view plugs in so neatly to worship of the uniform military, to being pro-war, etc. And so that I think is where you could conceivably connect this deeply illiberal view of politics to conservative war-pronness today, which is that this constant view, you're seeing people beheading, you're seeing people this stuff is on the news all the time. It's vivid in the public eye in a way that horrible things that were going on halfway around the world in 200 years ago were not very vivid in the public eye. And we have this enormous military establishment that is terrifically professional and all of these other things and really an icon of America. And so that I think is where you might be able to get from the political theory to the political phenomenon is that, to my mind, pernicious view of American nationalism. But their conservative side, especially coming out of the neocon Cold War era, is just America's indispensable, the indispensable nation of the world to create not only peace and stability in the world, and we did it during the Cold War, and we had to oppose communism. And then we continue to do it now and there's no one else. And if America wasn't around, there would be a power vacuum, everything would dissolve, and America is uniquely situated to do that because it's exceptional. That follows from, I think, what you were saying. Yeah, I think that's right, and I think that's, again, you just laid out, you know, as the devil's advocate or whatever, several causal theories about, you know, if not us, then whom? The world will go to hell in a handbasket if we don't do. You know, those, I think, are implicit arguments that are infrequently smoked out and made explicit. And I think to the extent you do those things, you really push on some of the more sort of policy-based arguments that get people to believe the sorts of things that you just described. I'm talking about military spending. I mean, so obviously you are saying we should have less involvement in the affairs of the world from military standpoint as we do now, but does that mean that we should also radically scale back the size and scope of our military? When we talk about needing to cut spending, so should we cut spending dramatically in military affairs? That is connected. The domestic effects of foreign intervention seem to be tied with that, too, right? Sure. You know, $750 billion is a lot of coin to a Midwestern like me. Sure. So I think that there is a strong case for cutting military spending, both from a sort of economic welfare standpoint. If we had hundreds of billions of dollars clunking around doing something else, I think it would have a greater impact on the general welfare of the American people than it would on a variety of military programs. But I also think that one of the principle positive impacts of cutting spending in such a way would be to erode the 60-year-old national security bureaucracy, right? So much of the information about what threatens the American people comes to them from people who work on countering threats to the American people. And again, it's unrealistic to expect, you know, people who work for SAIC or the Pentagon or Lockheed Martin to say we're actually pretty safe. And so one of the great virtues of cutting military spending would be sending lots of those people to do honest work in a different field and limiting the sort of drumbeat of fear about where America stands in the world. I mean, one of the things when I really want to wake people up before a talk, I say, you know, I want to make a provocative claim here. The United States is the most secure great power in the modern era. There has never been a more secure great power in the modern era, certainly in 1500. And people sort of push back and say, whoa, do you really, how could that possibly be true? And you know, if you look at Great Britain, if you look at Imperial Japan, they all faced proximate problems close to them. And so there is, you know, people say, well, this is, you know, distance doesn't matter anymore. Distance matters a lot. If the United States had been squished onto the European continent or squished onto Southeast Asia somewhere, the United States would probably look very different than it looks today. Geography still matters in 2014. And that's something that's very alarming, you know, very, very strange to hear for many people, but it's quite true. And so the combination of American geography and admittedly, you know, and I would want to keep a large, not a large nuclear arsenal, but a significant nuclear arsenal and a military that is qualitatively light years ahead of competitors, we just don't need the scale of all those things. So people tend to say, well, cut the military budget, we'll get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse, whack some contractors, cut military pay, good luck with that, and do a number of other things. I'm stealing this from our colleague, Ben Friedman, but the reason the military costs so much is not so much the $900 hammer or the contractor with the house in McLean or what have you. It's tasked with doing an enormous amount of things around the world. And so the idea that you're going to have this seamless, frictionless government bureaucracy that spends several hundred billion dollars per year protecting the world from itself that runs efficiently is just sort of a completely incoherent term, right? It's going to be inefficient no matter if my sort of wildest fantasy of what the Pentagon should look like were to come true. It will still be inefficient, but the larger it is and the more things it's tasked with doing, you're just compounding that inefficiency on and on and on while creating a number of groups and a number of interests in maintaining itself which need to point to threats. So that's a long-winded way of saying, not only do I think the defense budget will be cut, but I think that one of the salutary consequences of doing so would be to get rid of lots of people who are constantly threat-mongering to the American people. And that seems to be exactly what conservatives don't get about foreign policy. They're skeptical about government's ability to create a healthcare system or to run Obamacare, but not seemingly as skeptical about government's ability to run a $900 billion military and maybe even create a new country from scratch. Right. I was going to say actually that, you know, shutter to think what conservatives would have said if Obamacare had been called Obamacare, but since conservatives drew up Obamacare in the first place, maybe that's not the best example. But it is certainly the case that if you put the word defense in a program, conservatives just sort of, you know, blow a circuit and can't think of it as the government. Things that happen across the river are still the federal government. It still acts like the federal government. And again, even the things that I want the Pentagon to do, it's still the federal government to just be cognizant of that. And so what we're going to do is send this arm of the federal government overseas to make Iraq into a democracy. Well, should we send HUD? Should we send the IRS maybe? I mean, you know, so there's a weird bifurcation of the good government guys, the good guys in the government who aren't really the government and therefore we don't have to be that wary of and lowest learner. There are dozens of lowest learners running around and you don't even care what they're up to. So that's maybe what conservatives get wrong. What do liberals and progressives tend to get wrong about foreign policy? Lots. They often think that they are pacifist but they don't seem to be or more passive. So it's weird because people at think tanks that I argue with and other people in town, people think that there's a great disagreement between Republicans and Democrats on foreign policy. And to a certain extent at the grassroots, again, Medea Benjamin versus Bill Crystal, yeah, I mean, or whoever the, you know, my you know, uncle out the Midwest, yes, he disagrees a lot with Medea Benjamin. But the foreign policy establishment really, if you think about it, you know, Robert Kagan and Hillary Clinton, one is a Republican, one is a Democrat. They don't disagree hardly at all. All of the tropes about American leadership and dispensable nation, these are shared by the Republican and Democratic halves of the foreign policy establishment. And just to get slightly off topic for a minute, the perverse thing that happens, given the tiny disagreement between the Republican and Democratic foreign policy establishments, even people get the sense that there is disagreement in Washington between the political parties on foreign policy because they're arguing all the time. What they're arguing about all the time are minutiae. How mean should we be to the United Nations? Little mean, don't be that mean. These are peripheral questions when it comes to American foreign policy. So what progressives get wrong about foreign policy I just wanted to qualify in the foreign policy establishment, pretty much all the same things that hawkish conservatives or new conservatives get wrong about foreign policy. What I think progressives, if we think about the Medea Benchmans or the sort of archetypal progressive, I think there is an unwillingness to recognize that military force does matter. There's the great trope and I've had to say it myself because it's true sometimes that there's no military solution to this. Sometimes the only solution is a military solution. Well, not just World War II, right? Sometimes the only way wars can end is when someone wins. That's a military solution just generally. So I think there's too little recognition that sometimes there are military solutions and sometimes the only solution is a military solution. And secondly I think there's a tendency to believe that international organizations, international law, international institutions matter more than they do. I think they do matter at the margin but for real lefties who are looking to them to put a break on American expansionism I think that's a fantasy. And I think it's not just a fantasy about the United States. Look, states use and abuse the United Nations when it serves their interests and they pay lip service to it and they pay lip service to international law but they more or less do what they want and so I think just it's an analytical mistake to look to international norms, international law, international institutions as providing anything worthy of the label global governance. It's mostly PR covering the things that powerful states want to do so those are two things that I think lefties tend to get wrong. We've talked today a lot about grand theory of approaching foreign policy questions and the short term and kind of on the ground practical matters what sorts of changes, realistic changes could we be or should we be making today to improve our foreign policy? It's a good question and I as so often the case don't have a happy answer to it. One of the things I think people should understand is that foreign policy in the United States is by and large an elite sport. We have elites that in the political science are got sent cues to Republican or Democratic partisans and Republican or Democratic partisans take those cues and hold the beliefs that the cues imply and I think that they're part of the reason that exists is because we can believe crazy things about international politics if we were the Republic of Georgia or the Republic of Lithuania or somewhere that was facing approximate threat or countries that are under great duress tend not to believe terribly crazy things about international politics but when you're really secure you can because it's just sort of a luxury good and that's part of the problem is that people don't care about international politics. The voters are really insulated from a lot of the costs sure it costs a lot of money but it's dispersed across 330 million people if you increase defense spending it pulls that problem and even if you start a pretty big, pretty bad war people get over it right the headlines are unpleasant for a while but we never lose Florida so I think the insulation from costs is a problem and what this isn't really so much a policy answer it is a political answer there's an enormous donor class particularly well in both parties really that are invested in activist interventionist foreign policy and there are lots of big donors that don't favor an activist interventionist foreign policy but it doesn't really matter to them that much it's not that salient as developing single payer healthcare or not developing single payer healthcare or what have you and I think that if there were more competition among that donor class to say look I'll support candidates in my party but I don't want this lady that has these boneheaded ideas about doing this to that country that would I think have the most salutary effect in clearing space among elites for candidates for congress candidates for president and you know people on the broadcast media who are identifiable as co-partisans of the people who watch those media and the people who vote for those parties but who don't hold their consensus view of the republican or democratic party on foreign policy issues so perversely I have a sort of top down view of how these problems evolve and yeah I think the best thing that you could do is to break apart the sort of cartel that runs American foreign policy today but that again will start at the top of the free thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks to learn more about Libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org