Category Archives: International issues

Yoram Hazony: my preliminary criticism

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So far, I have only finished the introduction to The Virtue of Nationalism. I think he fails Bryan Caplan’s ideological Turing Test. He says that the opposite of nationalism is imperialism. I don’t think his opponents would accept the imperialist label. It is like telling a secular leftist that your religion is leftism. Such analysis might have a grain of truth, but it is not a good approach for engaging in dialogue.

I think there are two versions of internationalism in the U.S.: the neocon version; and the Western Guilt version. They are usually opposed to one another.

The neocon version could plausibly viewed as imperialist. They see America as the indispensable nation, supporting the peace and prosperity of the world. The term Pax Americana is positive in the neocon view. (Although they are not card-carrying neocons, Findlay and O’Rourke in Power and Plenty, if I recall correctly, make a case that periods of trade expansion, peace, and prosperity historically have coincided with strong hegemonic power.)

The Western Guilt version sees America as the nation that needs to be cut down to size. Instead of telling other people how to behave, Americans ought to learn from other cultures. The neocons disparage this view, as when they refer to “Obama’s apology tours.” But whether you love or loathe the Western Guilt proponents, they would not recognize themselves as imperialists.

Indeed, the way that Hazony describes imperialism, almost any transnational proposal becomes an imperialist project. A libertarian idea for open borders. An environmentalist proposal to fight climate change. While there is plenty of room to argue that these ideas could only be implemented in the context of a global empire with a single ruler, establishing such an empire is not the objective of these specific initiatives.

In any case, I am not ready to accept Hazony’s either/or distinction between imperialism and nationalism. I would say that there are questions of jurisdiction. You know how when two businesses sign a contract, there might be a provision saying that any dispute will be decided in a particular state? If contracting were costless, every interaction between people could have such a provision. To put it another way, one can imagine in theory a world in which the jurisdiction for every interaction is chosen voluntarily. As it happens, but that is not possible in practice.

In the real world, for most interactions there is a presumption that jurisdiction is based on location. So within the U.S., you presume that if you go to court it will be an American court, not a French court. As I see it from this jurisdictional perspective, although nationalism is not something that was dreamed up by libertarians, it can be treated as a “libertarian realist” outcome.

Part of “libertarian realism” is my belief that the ultimate arbiter of jurisdictional disputes is force. As another illustration, think of crime families. If you’re in the Corleone family territory, the Godfather has jurisdiction.

There are a lot of cross-border interactions nowadays. So how do we settle ultimate jurisdictional disputes? It could be an international body–an international Supreme Court, if you will. Or it could be ultimately the strongest country interested in the dispute.

To be cynical, I can see why an Israeli, with the Palestinian conflict in mind, would not be an advocate of deferring to an international body. To be equally cynical, I can see why a professional Weberian bureaucrat or diplomat might advocate increased deference to international organizations. I would be surprised if one can make an over-arching, overwhelming theoretical argument in favor of one model over the other.

But that is all preliminary to reading the book.

The American right wing

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A foreign correspondent asked me about it, I presume because he found the Wikipedia entry that is based on a blog post that I wrote when I was, without realizing it, quite confused. So at this point I would say that I do not know what the term “neoreaction” means, and if I don’t, who does?

Now, I think that the central issue in American right-wing politics is nationalism. (Note, I may be overly influenced by recent exposure to Yoram Hazony.) I will get to that shortly. But a few preliminary comments.

1. I think that many Americans reject the aggressive forms of progressivism. Even many left-of-center Democrats believe that conservative speakers on college campuses are entitled to be heard. They think that people with religious faiths should have room to follow their beliefs, as long as they do not harm others. They think that the private sector is not perfect but that government is not perfect either.

2. I think that there is a set of Americans who make a big deal about what they perceive as threats to the white race, but this set is really, really tiny.

3. Progressives would like to believe that all of their opponents belong to (2). They do not want to concede that many of their opponents are respectable exponents of (1).

4. The issue of nationalism vs. transnationalism is what is most important to understand. In America, there is a long tradition of opposition to transnationalism. Many Americans are suspicious of rules made by international bodies. They are skeptical of sending American aid or American soldiers to deal with foreign problems.

5. Since World War II, American elites have been much more transnationalist than ordinary Americans. Elites on the left like international bodies that make rules and sanction military interventions. Elites on the right believe that American involvement in other countries is necessary in order to protect our national interests. For a recent statement of the elite-right view, see Robert Kagan in Saturday’s WSJ.

6. Populists on the left have taken the opposite point of view. On the Democratic side, the slogan “Come home, America” emerged durng the Vietnam War. On the Republican side, from Robert Taft through Patrick Buchanan through Donald Trump, opposition to internationalism has always had a spokesman. When George W. Bush ran for President in 2000, he used nationalist rhetoric. He ended up governing as an internationalist, especially after 9/11.

7. Mr. Trump is the first nationalist to win the Presidency since World War II. Conservative intellectuals who are in the internationalist camp are “never-Trumpers.” Conservative intellectuals who are nationalists are inclined to be Trump supporters. But Trump’s populist rhetoric turns off conservative intellectuals of all stripes.

8. Libertarians like the non-interventionist aspect of nationalism, but we hate the anti-trade, anti-immigrant aspect of nationalism. Overall, libertarians do not approve of Mr. Trump. We differ on how we think he compares with his opponents.

Russ Roberts and Yoram Hazony

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I found this one of the most interesting econtalk podcasts. Let me pick one nit. Trying to argue that nationalism is not inherently war-generating, Hazony says,

universal wars are devoted to some kind of an ideology of world domination. I the case of the 30-Years’ War, it was the theory of the universal Catholic order. In the case of the Nepolonic Wars, the theory of the new universal French liberalism. And, in the two World Wars, an attempt by two German emperors in effect to try to, uh, make Germany Lord of the Earth.

My nit is with taking the view that World War I was an attempt to create a world order. Let’s even stipulate that Germany was the most war-seeking nation in 1914. My reading of the history is that Germany did not have a goal of world domination. I buy the argument that Germany started the first World War out of fear that if it did not fight then, it would at some point have to fight on more adverse terms. It saw Russia getting stronger every decade. Its ally, Austria-Hungary, had obvious weaknesses.

After World War I, many people saw the war as a case of nationalism run amok. I still think that is an appropriate way to look at it.

Now that The Virtue of Nationalism is available, I expect I will be giving it more attention going forward.

Is internationalism liberal or imperalist?

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Tyler Cowen writes,

In other words, it could be that the fractious and increasingly nationalistic politics of today are how things naturally are — and the anomaly is this decades-long period of cooperation and harmony.

He calls the internationalist approach “liberalism,” and he laments its inability to persist.

Contrast with Yoram Hazony.

For centuries, the politics of Western nations have been characterized by a struggle between two antithetical visions of world order: an order of free and independent nations, each pursuing the political good in accordance with its own traditions and understanding; and an order of peoples united under a single regime of law, promulgated and maintained by a single supra-national authority. . .

the imperial rulers of the ancient world saw it as their task, in the words of the Babylonian king Hamurabi, to “bring the four quarters of the world to obedience.” That obedience, after all, was what ensured salvation from war, disease, and starvation.

And yet, despite the obvious economic advantages of an Egyptian or Babylonian peace that would unify humanity, the Bible was born out of a deep-seated opposition to that very aim. To Israel’s prophets, Egypt was “the house of bondage,” and they spared no words in deploring the bloodshed and cruelty involved in imperial conquest and the imperial manner of governing

Hazony sees the quest for international order as intrinsically imperialist. He has a forthcoming book that extends these arguments.

I believe that this is an issue that is particularly challenging for libertarians. We believe that national borders restrict freedom, including the freedom to live where you want. But what if every project to get rid of national borders is one in which power is concentrated in a central authority?

Whose problems would you prefer?

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Tyler Cowen writes,

Over a period of less than five years, China will retake Taiwan and also bring much of East and Southeast Asia into a much tighter sphere of influence. Turkey and Saudi Arabia will build nuclear weapons and become dominant players in their regions. Russia will continue to nibble at the borders of neighboring states, including Latvia and Estonia, and NATO will lose its credibility, except for a few bilateral relationships, such as with the U.K. Parts of Eastern Europe will return to fascism. NAFTA will exist on paper, but it will be under perpetual renegotiation and hemispheric relations will fray.

This is not his forecast of the most likely future, but he tees it up as a pessimistic scenario.

I think that forecasting the emergence of other powers is easy if you think only in terms of the problems that the U.S. faces. But you get a different point of view if you think about other countries’ problems and ask, “Whose problems would you prefer?”

China is aging rapidly. It faces the problem known as premature de-industrialization, meaning that there is not enough demand for manufactured goods to provide a broad base of middle-class jobs for low-skilled workers. If giant cities connected by high-speed rail are the most efficient configuration, then fine. But what if that turns out to be a bad bet?

I do not agree that Turkey has a chance to be a dominant player in its region. Nobody in the region likes the Turks. The Turks don’t even like each other very much. There are major divides between urban and rural, between religious and secular. If they come to dominate, it will only be in a tallest-pygmy sort of way.

Saudi Arabia, like Turkey, has yet to show that its entire society is on board with modernization. If only a thin sliver of elite is ready to join the modern world, then it will have plenty of internal conflicts to worry about. It won’t be a dominant player.

According to David Halberstam, in the early 1960s at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet leader Khrushchev told Americans that Laos would fall “like a rotten apple” into Communist hands. Today, if we look around for rotten apples, meaning regimes that are failing to deliver for their people, we can find them in Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and Iran. If those apples were to fall, particularly the latter two, that would make up for foreign policy problems that might emerge elsewhere.

Again, Tyler is not arguing that the pessimistic scenario is the most likely one. But I think he gives it a notably higher p than I would.

Technology and Autocracy

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Tyler Cowen writes,

the governance technologies and strategies of authoritarian regimes have become much more efficient.

I’m not sure that this holds in general. Venezuela?

I am willing to speculate that right now autocrats have a comparative advantage at staying in power. That is, in a Martin Gurri world, where the public is in revolt in many places (Italy, Germany, the U.S., Iran, various countries in Latin America), it is easier for an official to remain in power if he has the tools to suppress the most challenging forms of opposition.

The authoritarian moment

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David Brooks writes,

progressives are getting better and more aggressive at silencing dissenting behavior. All sorts of formerly legitimate opinions have now been deemed beyond the pale on elite campuses. Speakers have been disinvited and careers destroyed. The boundaries are being redrawn across society.

There seems to be a bit of a trend. Putin is getting more authoritarian. Erdogan is getting more authoritarian. Xi Xinping is getting more authoritarian.

I know I’m not saying anything original here. But I wonder what it will take to turn things around.

Yoram Hazony on classical liberalism

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He writes,

Modern classical liberals, inheriting the rationalism of Hobbes and Locke, believe they can speak authoritatively to the political needs of every human society, everywhere. In his seminal work, “Liberalism” (1927), the great classical-liberal economist Ludwig von Mises thus advocates a “world super-state really deserving of the name,” which will arise if we “succeed in creating throughout the world . . . nothing less than unqualified, unconditional acceptance of liberalism. Liberal thinking must permeate all nations, liberal principles must pervade all political institutions.”

Hazony sees this as universalism, and he sees universalism as leading to the project of worldwide dominion and hence, for example, to the war in Iraq. He draws a line from Mises and Hayek 80 years ago to the neoconservatives of recent decades.

I found the essay to be odd. He writes,

Establishing democracy in Egypt or Iraq looks doable to classical liberals because they assume that human reason is everywhere the same, and that a commitment to individual liberties and free markets will arise rapidly once the benefits have been demonstrated and the impediments removed. Conservatives, on the other hand, see foreign civilizations as powerfully motivated—for bad reasons as well as good ones—to fight the dissolution of their way of life and the imposition of American values.

I have some differences with the folks that I think of as contemporary classical liberals. But I think I can speak for what they would say about the foregoing paragraph.

1. Democracy is not the same as classical liberalism, and majoritarian democracy can be antithetical to classical liberalism.

2. A classical liberal society is one with strong individual rights, including economic rights.

3. A classical liberal society is a universal good, but that does not imply that the American government should send people with guns to other countries to try to turn them into classical liberal societies. Even non-military intervention by our government is wrong. Our idea of universal is that just as we oppose American government officials trying to run our own lives, we oppose them trying to run the lives of people in other countries.

Hazony also writes,

Integrating millions of immigrants from the Middle East also looks easy to classical liberals, because they believe virtually everyone will quickly see the advantages of American (or European) ways and accept them upon arrival. Conservatives recognize that large-scale assimilation can happen only when both sides are highly motivated to see it through. When that motivation is weak or absent, conservatives see an unassimilated migration, resulting in chronic mutual hatred and violence, as a perfectly plausible outcome.

With this paragraph, I believe that he frames the debate about immmigration between classical liberals and conservatives correctly. On this blog, I have seen many commenters take the conservative position. And you know that elsewhere Bryan Caplan speaks for the classical liberal position. I hope that the classical liberals are correct, but I fear that the conservatives may be correct. Rather than eliminate immigration enforcement entirelyl, I would prefer to incrementally increase legal immigration and observe the results.

Overall, I believe that Hazony is correct that the right is divided about President Trump, and that classical liberals are not happy with his economic nationalism. However, I think that when he positions classical liberals as the foreign policy interventionists and conservatives as the non-interventionists, he gets it almost 180 degrees wrong.

After I first composed this post, but before it was scheduled to appear, Alberto Mingardi did a nice job of making the points that I wished to make. Mingardi writes,

Mises was actually criticising the international body of the time (the League of Nations), but expressed hope for “a frame of mind” that looks to see individual rights protected, not just within one’s country but also abroad. I agree that Mises’s use of the word ‘superstate’ is unfortunate, but it is clear that all he is pointing toward is a liberal sensibility that traverses national boundaries.

Dueling views of China

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Tyler Cowen said,

in terms of human talent, GDP, China right now is in most ways a peer country to the United States. We’re not ready for that, mentally or emotionally.

In contrast, Peter Zeihan sees China in a precarious position:

1. China is the about to age at the most rapid rate of any country. Over the next twenty years, the average age of the U.S. population will barely budget, but the average age in China will rise 5 years.

2. China is much more dependent on trade than the U.S. It needs to import great quantities of oil, from the Middle East. According to Zeihan, “somewhere between 40 percent and 50 percent of the Chinese economy is directly involved in international commerce.”

3. China’s navy would have a very difficult time operating out of China’s waters.

4. China’s geography is conductive to internal strife and warfare, but not to economic integration.

Ralph Peters sounds like David Halberstam

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Peters writes,

It really comes down to that blood test: What will men die for? The answer, were we willing to open our eyes, is that more Afghans will volunteer to die for the Taliban than for our dream of a “better” Afghanistan. Nor could the Taliban have survived without support among the population. This is Mao 101.

The entire column is in that vein. It sounds very similar to Halberstam’s diagnosis of the Vietnam tragedy.

Frederick W. Kagan makes the case for staying in Afghanistan. An excerpt:

to prevent al Qaeda and ISIS from regaining the base from which al Qaeda launched the 9/11 attacks and from which both would plan and conduct major attacks against the US and its allies in the future. He [President Trump] also described the minimum required outcome: an Afghan state able to secure its own territory with very limited support from the US and other partners. This outcome is essential to American security and it is achievable.

My guess is that the call that the President has to make concerning Afghanistan is a close one, but I am more inclined to agree with Peters. I have no military experience or any other basis for expertise, but for what it’s worth, here are a couple of my thoughts:

1. I am leery of blaming the problems of the Afghan government on corruption. In a limited-access order (borrowing the terminology of North, Weingast, and Wallis), what we call corruption is the only way for a government to remain in power. More generally, if victory depends on our capabilities for nation-building, then I have doubts about the mission.

2. If the Taliban took over, we might be able to convince them not to allow Al Qaeda a safe haven there. If deterrence works, then that would be cheaper than war.