This morning I listened to a thought-provoking discussion between Robert Wright and Ezra Klein about U.S. foreign entanglements. I highly recommend it. It takes about an hour.
Here are a few of my takeaways after a first listen (I should listen again):
- The American public doesn't pay ANY ATTENTION to any of the horrifying foreign interventions that the U.S. foreign policy establishment (or FPE; or "the blob", to use Wright's term) engineers every now and then in the name of the American people ... until American soldiers start to die in large numbers.
- From Vietnam onward, the U.S. has had a perfect record of massive failure and massive devastation wherever it has intervened. The sheer loss of life in places like Vietnam, Kampuchea, Iraq, and Afghanistan has been ENORMOUS.
- The suffering caused by economic sanctions -- in places like Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela -- can go on for much longer because they don't lead to U.S. soldiers dying in large numbers. The FPE never attaches a falsifiable prediction to any economic sanctions proposal. The sanctions inflict pain on ordinary people. The promised transformations never materialize. The domestic governments invariably say to their people, "The U.S. sanctions are causing your misery."
- The people in the FPE have never been held accountable for their misjudgements, their horrendous policy advice, and their unwillingness to take responsibility for their mistakes. (McNamara was perhaps the only FPE person who expressed some contrition late in life.) So many lives have been lost all over the world but nobody in the FPE has been held accountable. (The Economist magazine trotted out Kissinger -- Kissinger! -- to attack Biden's botched withdrawal. Sure, people who make mistakes may still have something interesting to say. But why give them a forum until they accept their mistakes?)
- The U.S. needs to find a way, urgently, to hold accountable the people in the FPE who gave bad advice and never admitted error. (Similarly, the U.S. needs to find a way to hold accountable "experts" who gave bad, say, economic advice and never admitted error.) The media needs to shine a light on the advice these people gave and the toll that their advice took, especially in other countries. Without accountability the cycle will repeat (perhaps against rising China).
- Foreign policy interventions abroad should be subject to stringent time-bound empirical tests. (Deadlines are subject to the they'll-simply-wait-us-out criticism. But they are essential nonetheless. The alternative is an intervention that can never fail -- even if it never succeeds.)
- Except when proven small-scale interventions exist -- see #6 above -- the U.S. needs to learn to live with countries of all kinds. Cooperation -- even when it requires the use of nose clips -- is a must, in order to deal with global problems such as terrorism, climate change, pandemics, etc.
