John Mueller: The Stupidity of War || The Human Progress Podcast Ep. 4

[Music] john mueller welcome to the human progress podcast thank you very much nice to be here i thought i would talk to you today about your new book the stupidity of war american foreign policy and the case for complacency and for those of you our viewers and listeners who don't know john mueller john is of course a political scientist at ohio state university he's a senior fellow at the cato institute and a member of the american academy of arts and sciences so john what's the book about well it's basically you could say the biography of an idea and the idea is that war at least international war is really very stupid and it took a long time for that to catch on though there must have been individual people who thought it previously uh before world war one is extremely common very easy to find people not russian prussian militarists but uh poets uh historians journalists talking about wars being beautiful honorable glorious redemptive well peace was disgusting and both filled with bovine content and materialistic and so forth um after the war uh that basically goes away uh you found maybe two people who said that at all since world war ii but since world war one so there's a major change in attitude and my argument is basically over the ensuing century that idea that international war should be gotten rid of has been fairly successful okay so world war one obviously plays a very large role in your narrative so uh how is world war one different from previous conflicts why is it so pivotal to to your theory yeah i can't really but what i can do is say what i just said namely before the war you can find hundreds of people saying how wonderful the war was and after the war it's almost impossible um and uh so war the war was probably important but what was unique about world war one uh well it was very destructive obviously but there are a huge number of destructive wars in the past including ones in which were like total annihilation took place uh the whole country or city was burned to the ground and people were everybody was killed and sold into slavery um it was obviously uh unromantic but it would come as no surprise to find out that mud and leeches and uh dysentery were not invented in 1914 it was very stupid but uh you know they were the trojan war between greece and the trojans was fought over the infidelities of a single woman uh and it lasted ten years and ended up with the total destruction of troy i mean the plenty if you want to find stupid wars it's not difficult um the thing that seems to be and there's there's a certain amount of economic development of course as you're well aware the european miracles starting to take place in the 19th century uh but it didn't seem to have any impact on more enthusiasm so it may have primed people somewhat uh for for a change but it did i don't think was conclusive in any sense but was unusual was that before world war one there was an active anti-war movement starting about 1889 um and it was a growing movement it was a gadfly movement it was ridiculed by the war supporters and so forth but it was there so my thinking is that world war one may have been necessary uh because it played into the hands of the peace movement at any rate whatever that's whether that's true or not at the end of the war uh the peace movement now suddenly became uh universal everybody wanted to get rid of that kind of war international war and they say colonial war or tribal wars or something but international war meaning wars among states particularly in europe um and uh they said about with the league of nations all kinds of things to try to do that um the world war two came of course uh japan was not part of this consensus uh and i think uh the war in europe probably would not have happened had hitler uh had hitler been run over by a truck or poisoned by his cook or something uh regardless what you think about that anyway after world war ii they came together again and this time uh it is stuck um so that we are now basically at a long an incredibly long period of 75 years in which there's been no wars among developed states particularly those in europe europe and the developed world you might call it um the the europe has now been freed from substantial international war for the longest period of time since the word europe was invented um and i think that's very that's really very significant um in addition what has happened is that the numbers of international obviously that that's the developed world i've been talking about um it's basically i know in human progress you want to talk about progress but what i want to talk about is the progress sense of some the most um the most memorable uh non-event in history which is world war three it never happened um but there are there were other international wars but most of them had clustered in the first half like before 1975 award between israel and the arab states or between india and pakistan and so now for the last 30 years the international wars which is amazingly small number the big big blank huge with numbers of wars the years in which there weren't any wars at all in the international warsaw um those one was a war between ethiopia and eritrea at the end of the last century the other two were the 911 wars in which the united states took out the taliban and took out the uh took out the saddam hussein's regime in iraq both of those wars the international wars were very brief of course then they ended up with long term civil wars or wars of insurgency so uh it just seems to me that basically this has been an enormous change and i think probably the bottom line on this and this course is speculative but i think you can make a good case for it i try to in my book at least is that an international war has basically become um not basically doesn't happen very much at all as a way for states to solve their differences in other words it's become to seem stupid there's still plenty of problems there's still economic sanctions they're still interesting in civil wars there's shots across bows there's there's uh efforts to uh you know get fishing rights uh there's pushing around there's lobbying cyber balloons uh in various arts as espionage continues as ever but the idea of using war to settle international disputes um uh differences is basically become substantially obsolete i think yeah it's disputes between countries yeah um the eritrea ethiopia war is very interesting uh i know a little bit about it just because i have a friend michaela wrong and a a london-based uh journalist who has written extensively about ethiopia and eritrea and this particular conflict may well be one of the more stupid wars over a tiny little village of badme and i don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people died on each side over a tiny piece of territory in the middle of a desert or something like that so that's very strange um what's different is that that that used to be the standard thing i mean you know it's like that europe was the most warlike of continents uh over eggshells frequently um in your research uh did you find any interesting um nascent anti-war sentiment in britain and in the british empire during the boer war i asked that because i i spent part of my childhood in south africa and i seem to recall reading in south african history that there was a large chunk of the british population in 1899 1900 that really became quite vociferously anti-imperial anti-war partly as a result of the surprise that the english received in south africa at the hands of the boers the boers were able to purchase sophisticated uh military machinery from germany maxim guns and so forth and were able to inflict very heavy losses on the british on the british troops and i think this may have been the first time that the the brits have found uh a near equal in their fight for for territory and as a result of the massive casualties uh war became slightly less sexy as early as 1900 is there something to it yes definitely when i mentioned the anti-war movement which is really fascinating and really much under discussed um it was started with a novel by a novelist named berto van sootner a noble woman from austria called lay down your arms in 1889 and she had become an anti-war she you know she did she'd write around and become more and more discontented with war and that's part of the novel uh but then she wrote this book and it suddenly it went viral uh and she was flabbergasted i mean you know she calls it an accident uh she wrote the book obviously in good faith and hoping people would buy it obviously uh but she never expected this and it really started an anti-war movement throughout throughout effort throughout europe and also in the united states and canada um and so you had peace societies uh you had prominent industrialists joining the frey like andrew carnegie and alfred nobel um and so and there's sort of a groundswell of you know this became sort of the thing one would talk about uh but it was much much drowned out by the pro war types who said war is inevitable god wants people to have war um you can read for example uh let me just read you a passage from a uh uh a journal in the 19th century uh called 19th century sort of a intellectual you know hudson review type thing and it's written by uh and i came across it it's called god's purpose by war it's written by a reverend father h.i.d writer he says this is the theologian war evokes the best qualities of human nature giving the spirit a predominance over the flesh so it's very common there's a british historian in 1910 or so talking about a world of peace would be never happened to be horrible it'd be the world sunken to bovine content um so it's always there there was there's also in britain shortly after what you're talking about in the end of 1910s uh in 1900s um that there was a um not a non-fiction book written by norman angel and uh he called the grand illusion he couldn't get a publisher for it people said you know he went around and talked to people in the publishers and they said no find a quaker publisher no um but he finally published it and then it went viral too and his argument was economic his argument was that war may or may not have been a good idea in the bad days but in the old days but it's lost its meaning now now we can trade it's very very very 21st century in a lot of ways um uh you know people would say well we have to we have to stop the germans because they'll take over canada and what you need and they need to ask them why do you want it why would they want to take over canada uh and they said well they want to get the canadian wheat and you say well if they want the canadian wheat now what do they do they can go to canada and buy the wheat right and they said yeah well yeah i mean it just you know so his argument was basically um war was feudal economically futile and he was he was uh you know he had he had also a fair amount of following um so there was this growing movement it was attracting fairly prominent people business people um some politicians and so forth but it was still basically derided um an angel's argument was said what are you talking about we don't fight wars for booty we fight wars for grand glorious honor you know whatever uh it's disgusting even talk about booty um and um there was also uh an idea that this is a woman's movement uh that the women the women are very prominent like berta von zutener who eventually won the nobel peace prize um and shortly after 1900 um and uh that men who joined it were uh ants uh you know they answered both elderly ians of both sexes are in this men in other words you didn't you didn't last you lacked masculinity so the movement was definitely there and you're quite right uh there's various things that that triggered it there are a fair number of economists um and uh uh uh other intellectuals uh uh joining the fray at various points but it's still very so so what you couldn't do is escape the argument the argument was out there you could ridicule it and you really killed it big time but what happened was that after the war changed okay so essentially your argument could be it's analogous to what happens in late 18th century with the declaration of independence and assertion that all men are created equal once the idea is born it starts mushrooming it starts expanding and ultimately it triumphs right and the analogous argument that you are making would be that once the idea of war is stupid peace is better is born then it creates its own momentum in a way yeah it did but there's but you know wars have always been stupid but right when the grease in the throat and say boy that was really stupid uh they do it after the napoleonic wars right after the 30 years war it just i spent a lot of my career trying to figure out why ideas change and it's really hard you know um in in shakespeare's day they would close the they would close the um theaters because they they correctly thought that human contact somehow was invisibly spreading the disease but why didn't somebody say that could be the same in water took three centuries before someone you know looked at drinking water and the huge improvements of health that took place at the end of the 19th century came from that but why did it happen earlier uh all men are created equal why didn't somebody talk about that 200 to 200 2 000 years earlier they knew what democracy was you know greek said it um so it was not a new idea but it was still known when the americans did it as the american experiment to show that democracy can work the other arguments i've come across for the decline in international conflicts would be things like we are so rich now at least in the western developed world that uh war has become unthinkable because the losses to the material stand of living that we have become accustomed to would be so great that you know it's we we best not go down that route and another argument that i have encountered is that since in the developed world so few babies are being born i mean korea right now the total fertility rate per woman is one in central eastern europe it's like 1.3 1.2 that that children have now become so precious that we don't want to uh expose them to the horrors of war do do any of these two arguments uh jive with you or or not really yeah not not very much uh the uh uh the uh you know decline in infamous reduction in women having children is a fairly recent thing the opposition to war goes back a century before we fight uh and it was uh over the in over a short period of time that suddenly people said let's not do that anymore so i don't think is it that they value the human life that much more and the economic thing is really tricky because when you get bigger economies they can tolerate wars better i mean there's a study there's a study for example of a city during the 30 years war in prussia germany um and uh yes economic studies it took a hundred years for that city to get back to where it was before the 30 years war uh after world war one germany was back in action best back to 1913 standards by about 1920 28 about 10 years and after world war ii germany and this time the waters course fought on german turf was pretty much backed in 1938 standards by 1948 49 50. um so the recovery recovery is actually very fast economically it's not that it's not that we have more to lose we do have more to lose but we also are incredibly good because of the in strength of modern economies are able to recover very quickly as we may see now with hovind fading away okay so we have this change um and again correct me if i'm wrong but you are really talking about cultural psychological and ethical changes you are not talking about human nature changing and becoming more peaceful so did we did we get it wrong all along that humans are by nature violent and conflictual you know when hobbs talks about life being short brutish and whatever um yeah nasty nasty british in short so you know obviously genes change at a much slower pace than culture than than ethics so we are working essentially with the same human but now for whatever reason um well you explained in your book uh that human is able to submerge that natural impulse towards towards violence um but that could also flip right yeah well it's a the way i put it is war is natural but it's not necessary sex is necessary eating is necessary defecating is necessary but but uh of course it's not um it's interesting that you can do war you can actually get people to go into uh these disastrous situations than waving flags and dying for their buddies um and uh actually really interesting very interested once i work up my courage i may try to write an article about shakespeare and war because i think he really was an anti-war type uh and in his most pro wars play is henry v and as henry v is going into battle he prays to god to take away the reason from the soldiers in others if they have reason they'll realize this is really stupid i shouldn't be doing this if you're running the opposite direction and that's really quite profound so essentially what you can do is you can actually mass people so they get killed as we saw in world war one or in the american civil war or many other wars by the hundreds of thousands um and they still you know keep going but it's not necessary you don't need it if you want to use an analogy with dueling because people would say that about dueling well young men and social certain social set or they have testosterone and all that kind of stuff uh and uh one that they have to take it out by fighting duels from time to time um well dueling has died out young men i don't think have changed their human nature uh they're as self-centered and you know belligerent as they ever were but they don't duel anymore it never occurs to them in fact to fight a duel to self you know you might hit the guy in the face uh you might talk behind his back and so forth you might sue him if if it's a libel type thing or something but and you still are get ticked off when your honor is besmirched when you're disrespected but men of that social class don't even think about it anymore so it's hard to imagine the genes would change also the change was very brief quick like four years you know from 1914 to 1920. uh you can't have a lot of gene change over that period of time since no you cannot okay so upshot is that humanity can be socialized into being more peaceful um in in a in a relatively short period of time and but but the opposite is also true that if you do have a militarist fanatic somewhere uh he can brainwash his people into uh into more like warlike disposition right um which brings us of course to hitler we haven't lost is the ability to do wars right no right i can't do them right right so that brings us really to hitler and to uh ira and and to irrational leaders i'm not you know hitler may have been rational in his own particular way but there are plenty of irrational leaders out there um how do you deal with the problem of hitler um and and the and second world war that's question number one question number two how do you deal with irrational individuals at the heads of government yeah i don't i don't see hitler's being being particularly irrational i mean he knew what he wanted he correctly doped out that he could fight for a while so he could fight blitzkrieg he invented the idea of blitzkrieg but in quick uh successful wars it would minimize casualties basically and be successful and he was successful until finally the soviet invasion uh and his uh attack on france in 1940 was an astounding success you know i guess you know sounds like sacrilege or something but if you go around i was the most successful military venture in all of human history that might be you know being the top list i think and that was hitler doing it um so um uh but what i can't find is there's anybody else with that opinion for example john i can give you 20 historians who basically say this but john kagan the great military historian says that in in in the 1930s or after world war one there was no european except hitler who wanted another war um and uh i think that's basically true because i looked i tried to find somebody on a soapbox saying let's do another war and so forth hitler didn't talk about he did he uh every single foreign policy speech he made was how much he hated war um and uh i've got fact i had a website in which i've taken all the passages from every there's like two or three pages two three sentences in every foreign policy speech which he says he war and he he would have convinced me that he hated war because he uses racial theory to justify it so in other words he said look at me i'm a racist why would i want to take over poland i have a bunch of poles and you know a lot of best germans would be killed in the process and then i'd have this thing the cesspool poles why would i want to do that now the french could do that because they're misogynistic you know they've even let africans in paris but not me i'm a racist um so my racial theory and then of course that that was that was the biggest lie obviously um but um basically uh there's there's several there's two books in particular dealing with german public opinion they both conclude that there was no drive for war there was nobody else around uh that shared his view except possibly a few top sycophants and none of them have much leadership ability nor did the people in the military um so that's why basically the question is you know you keep seeing things like it it is questionable that anybody could have led germany to war except adolf hitler and he was in a bad automobile crash in 1930 he almost got killed he almost in a guy in the beer hall push in the 1920s the guy next to him was killed by the police bullet but not him so just a minor change like that um could have could have could have made a huge difference so he's really essential you know it's a great tragedy of all time obviously so he's a he's he's a russian leader do we do you have any uh do you have any idea about or could you can you identify irrational leaders that cannot be reasoned with in the last half a century for example and what our response to them should be uh no it's really hard i don't find it a very helpful concept basically irrational if it serves if it sort of means crazy or something they make mistakes big mistakes anybody starts a war and then loses it obviously made a mistake uh assuming he wanted to win the war uh but they they're fairly well calculating um they may be but to me you know i think you know i was totally opposed to the iraq war that the united states went into uh in print um and uh basically i could see that the reasons justifying it were crazy they were goopy we're not not crazy but basically highly dubious like he was going to somehow with his screwball army dominate the middle east i mean how you know basically the argument was we can easily take saddam hussein out because he has such a rotten army if we don't take him out with that same rotten army he's going to dominate the middle east come on uh after the after the fighting in kuwait the army the iraqi army mainly showed how uh impressive it could it could be at doing bug outs and that was the same case also in the united states invaded in 2003. so the idea that he could dominate the middle east was was loopy it seems to me but i don't think it was irrational you know the reason you know i talked to a lot of people at that time who said no he you know he can't he's going to be just can't trust him he's going to you know do something daffy and i keep coming back as as other people have saying no he was quite rational in many cases for example he invaded iran um in in the early 80s and then realized it was a bad idea and he tried to get out of the war tried knowing that the committee the other on the other side wouldn't wouldn't agree so as far as i can see he's a reasoning of your individual that doesn't mean the reasoning is sound however yeah one could what could almost go as far as saying is that people who maintain themselves at the head of these dictatorial governments with all the things that could go wrong around them have to have a very attuned sense of cost benefits of their actions if the ultimate goal is self-preservation yeah it's a very tricky business and but it's certainly surely going to be our main motivation now so in in in your book you advise your advice two specific courses of action uh one is complacency and the one is appeasement so let's uh we'll leave appeasement for a second um i was born in czechoslovakia so i'm going to tease you with that one later but let's start with complacency and you had a wonderful quote from calvin coolidge one of my favorite presidents what's complacency all about and how does it fit in american foreign policy uh well he was sort of the guru of complacency in some respect because he said i think it's basically true if you see ten problems coming down the road at you the chances are nine of them will go into the ditch before they ever get to you and it seems to me that um if we if we had been uh if we had been complacent about terrorism what we would have done was go after it in a much more after all after 9 11 complacency would not have been appropriate totally after 9 11 but going at it with a war-like stance trying to take out the taliban and so forth it was not the way to do it it could have been done with the support of the taliban probably and also the support of saudi arabia and pakistan who are very much on the american side um so um that complacent would have been there in the case of saddam hussein complacency would have obviously been much better than this disastrous war that has ensued the the the the initial war and then of course this long war of occupancy um the number of people who have died because of the american intervention in iraq is now more than a hundred times higher than the number who died on 9 11. um and that should be kept in mind it just been you know a uh much better would have been complacency another way of putting it is if the united states has been complacent they wouldn't wouldn't have gone in vietnam and another two million people wouldn't have died if it had been complacent then after 9 11 it would have used different methods much milder methods try to take go after al qaeda and those all those people wouldn't have died and the country would not have been destroyed through the occupation and the same with uh in the case of iraq they wouldn't have done it at all um so um and i've also applied basically uh more like this section of course current threats and one of the arguments that goes through the book repeatedly is that um we've exaggerated threat we exaggerated how big the soviets were it's a military threat during cold war we exaggerated al qaeda massively after it after 9 11. and i think we're doing it again for example with both russia and china they do present problems they are something we have to worry about in some respects but they don't suggest a security threat they lob cyber balloons uh if they steal information um if they uh sure to throw their weight around um it's not really war it's it is and it may be a pain in the neck you may want to not deal with them but they don't represent a strategic military threat it seems to me so that uh another place for complacency would make some sense is in terms of um uh uh worrying about nuclear proliferation since since 1945 no one has been killed by a nuclear weapon but hundreds of thousands of people have been killed by war and sanctions efforts to try to prevent nuclear proliferation particularly in iraq north korea iran um and so complacency in that case would have been much better uh because they haven't done anything with the weapons it doesn't really matter that much whether they get these stupid things anyway and it's certainly better to deal with them in different ways than starting wars or economic sanctions which uh kill large numbers of people or people who died from economic sanctions and died from hiroshima nagasaki combined one argument that i'm sure you have encountered many many times is that this is all 2020 hindsight but in reality when you were right in the middle of the cold war facing the soviet divisions and tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that the american response was just right to counter the soviet threat with our own american militarization um tell me about the historical research on the intentions of of the soviets what do the archives show that the soviets really intended to do because as a child of the cold war um i obviously remember these things very well and i think that in eastern europe certainly a lot of people are still grateful to the americans and militarization under reagan for uh really quote unquote winning the cold war um but if the soviets were really contained and they didn't have any aggressive intentions then then the us militarizations and spending of so much money and interventions in korea and vietnam get a different gloss so what's your reading on the on the soviets and their intentions yeah the intentions were based they intended to take over the world uh they said it a million times never you know every propaganda every bumper sticker and so forth and everybody's violence is necessary a class warfare or civil war or subversion or something but they were not going to use direct war uh there's tons of evidence that they never considered seriously a war in europe much less a war against the united states much less of course starting a a nuclear war um and my concern during the cold war is that very few people saw that now what you say basically is we have to particularly after the korean war we have to be really worried that they're going to start a war okay well that's one hypothesis is that they really want to take over the war by world by military force but you could also say that come on get off it this is a this is a limited probe in a far-off area in korea and it doesn't pretend anything in terms of direct military aggression uh and very few people said that almost nobody in fact i got a quote in the book from john gattis who said in 1950 talking about the foreign policy establishment nobody nobody could imagine that we'd go uh for decades without a a major war including ones with nuclear weapons and it's on page 403 and i wrote gattis saying you know in the in the in the in the subject line it is page 403 um and i said you know do you really is that really you really believe that he said yeah i mean nobody nobody and um he said no there's nobody saying that uh that in other words there's nobody saying the proposition to prove to be true now that doesn't mean it was true but it fit the evidence you could say well the soviet union was uh uh uh devastated by world war ii um they've uh they've got a plan to take over the world but doesn't involve direct military aggression um and uh they fought on you know they fought to try to prevent world war ii uh with hitler and they were attacked by hitler they didn't attack the west um you could make that that doesn't mean it's necessarily true that they're still that way you want to consider the opposition but that argument was never there and i i have the one there's a couple of people maybe george cannon probably bernard brody among intellectuals defense intellectuals and foreign policy intellectuals but also interestingly um dwight eisenhower and i go into this in a fair amount of depth and i've looked into it pretty carefully and he really believed what i just said namely that we have to worry about them because of a sort of peaceful infiltration as he put it but they're not going to start wars um and he was fairly traumatized big time or you know the sky burst open for him right after the war he had been commander-in-chief of the american for the the allied forces in europe and once hitler was defeated he flew to moscow to meet with moscow to meet with stalin and then flying back he was flying either flying very low or there no clouds or something he could look down and everything was destroyed from moscow all the way to i guess berlin where he's flying back to he said these people aren't going to start another war you know and then he talked to them and they'd say look my son was killed in the war everybody's son was killed in the war except in families where the whole family was destroyed in that war we're not going to do that again with or without nuclear weapons but eisenhower was unwilling really to say that in public so that as he's leaving office he talks about we've got we're spending much too much money on on nuclear weapons in particular but on defense overall um uh and uh yeah but he blamed it on the military-industrial complex but what he didn't do was attack the premise for the military industrial complex the reason it was so successful was people thought the ruskies are coming over the border anytime now and taking over starting world war iii uh and he didn't believe that but he never basically said it really in public overall so my argument is not that they should not have been thinking about this and dean's trying to deter but they should have been looking at this other hypothesis that they didn't have to that hypothesis is not on the table um and um the the archives now show and that's what they said they never said they always said we're not going to attack we can defend ourselves if you attack us but not the other way around and the archives show this is this to be very much the case that that was true basically so the problem is that the proposition that proved to be true was not accepted by anybody no one was really advocating it and the proposition was false if you want to use an analogy you'll be with word 911. after 9 11 the same thing you go through discussions with the the uh um uh intelligence people and they said after 9 11 we were sure we are certain certain certain that there is going to be another attack and it'll be even bigger than the one in 9 11. and we talk see is there a halt in the hallway and say is this going to be the day and so forth and of course never happened no one is saying no that was hardly anybody was saying i was saying it happened i gave an interview to the columbus dispatch about the 12th of of uh september um and uh said well you know we shouldn't be overestimated with these guys because they happened to get lucky with a couple of horrible pot shots uh and two or three other people also academics at ohio state said the same thing marlin so it's possible to come to that conclusion uh that doesn't mean it's right i didn't say it was right i just said you know we have to think about that and it proved to be the hypothesis correct but in the top levels it was completely not there let's move on to on to the easy subject of appeasement um in uh in in your book um you say it's a perfectly legitimate way of conducting international relations um what do you mean by that a czechoslovak freaks out immediately right well the check the problem was it was unappeasable in 1938 didn't matter whether what the british french did in fact i believe in fact i believe that western powers britain specifically realized that hitler was unappeasible after he after he consumed the ramp check state in 1934 i believe 1930 sorry 1939 1917 1939 right yeah um yeah he his his basic uh statement at the time of the czech appeasement issue of munich was we want no checks that fits in what i was saying before well you want to check for a bunch of slobs i don't know i know you know what i think about slaws and so um and then of course when he took over the red the wrong czech republic uh and turned slovakia of course into a puppet state and so forth uh he he showed that that showed he was lying about that and so that's when they said this is it you can't if you do poland we're going to declare war on you and that's what they did um so he is unappeasable the argument of appeasement was that he was not planning to essentially attack but he won so handily in 1938 that encouraged him to do the attack on poland i think that's simply not true they've got two or three historians uh five or six historians they'll say that very strongly it was they used the word unappeasable now what appeasement basically means is if you go into a store um and uh uh and and you start bargaining with the dealer uh you come to some sort of agreement you mean you give in you appease them okay i'll give you more money than i think i really want to i'd rather you give me the product free uh and he says well i can't quite afford that can we work out a you know so appeasement and that kind of bargaining is is extremely common we use it all the time um uh currently in terms of international relations it seems to me that two of the things that both china the things that both china and russia want is to sort of get past what they call humiliations they say it all the time the chinese think there's a century of humiliation going back to the opium war where a big country now we're going to be taken seriously it seems to me that's just fine we should take them seriously uh and the russians say the same thing because they talk about humiliated because of the end of the cold war and it split up the soviet union uh which by the way was not caused by anything the americans did the overspending was done because of the stupid policies of the soviet union and aboriginal i think uh but basically um we should appease them you know we should say well let's let's work things out and and bring them in to councils for example on syria now the united states should be working it seems to me with the russians that's right this series over assad won that's not the best outcome i can possibly imagine but that's the case and this outcome is better than continuation of that horrible this disastrous civil war and so now something has to be done with assad something has to be done with syria and it seems to be both the united states and russia who are in the right position to do it should be working together to basically make syria back into the plain old-fashioned boring thing it used to be before which is what people want to do and on afghanistan the i think bringing in the chinese bringing in the russians bringing in the iranians to deal with pakistan it may not work but it would seem to be a sensible thing no everybody wants a nice old-fashioned boring afghanistan uh they don't want it to be a hotbed of islamic extremism the russians are very concerned about that the chinese are very concerned about that with their sin john thing is basically based on that the concern about terrorism from there uh the pakistanis would like to have a stability thing there if you can bring in the indians and the pakistanis both that would be really interesting probably can't do that but we're not even doing that it just seems like that'd be appeasement in a good sense let's let's talk this over maybe can help us out maybe it won't work but it would it would give them sort of stature and feeling good about themselves and maybe they could be healthy those one of the most striking things in your book i read was uh the the notion of territorial integrity as a standard in international relations which i totally buy is the the inviolability of borders that's what we got used to in europe after after the um uh after the fall of the berlin wall and that sort of thing and i really thought that that's where we were then crimea happens and that really breaks that that standard how do we deal with a problem of a country that goes beyond that standard breaks that standard how how do we resolve crimea in a way that that preserves the standard and at the same time satisfies the russians um the russian pride yeah basically my complacency standard says that uh give up it's hopeless um it's a one-off i mean the fear of 19 uh 2014 was that they could then do the same thing with lithuania and the sony and so forth in place there were substantial russian minorities no no one talks about that anymore because the bizarre one-off had to do with the black sea fleet had to do with the disintegration of the slave of ukraine generally over the election and it just seems to me that um it's over and we should recognize their accession and there was a vote uh which seems to have been more or less correct except what people boycotted it and a lot of crimeans given the instability in ukraine in which they saw fanatics we seem to be anti-russian fanatics potentially taking over is what the russians say but a lot of people believe that um crimea basically left voted to leave and we should treat basically crimea the same way the united states the chinese and the russians treat kosovo which was not with the vote uh in which the session in that sense was you know instituted uh and uh created by nato and uh without any kind of votes um um so so essentially it's a done deal as one person has put it crimea will go back to you to ukraine about the same time texas goes back to mexico um it's over and uh should work with russia get a non-aggression deal from putin which i think you know he has no intent of further aggression um work to try to get ukraine so that uh instead of being it's now the poorest country has been the poorest country in europe which is outrageous because it had everything going for it you know the advanced uh culture you know a lot of well-educated people some of the best farmland in the universe um and it's basically now the poorest country in europe per capita uh to try to get its act together get rid of the corruption and so forth which the current president seems to be actually doing something about so it seems to me a tough love for ukraine uh try to work out a deal on don boss which i think putin has actually said well we could have like uh the united nations forces between the two sides or something like that but still people his juridical um uh uh control in in kiev um and i think that would probably work um but basically we lost uh actually everybody lost there's a book called that about the ukraine everybody else the ukrainians lost the russians last year west europeans lost and the united states lost is a bad thing probably a very unwise thing for putin to do also relax sanctions which are not doing any good on that so my proposal is sort of unorthodox but i think sound it's not going to not sell well in washington no no it doesn't uh you know it's a sad thing i mean i'd be i'd be much more comfortable with what happened in crimea if the referendum could be rerun by uh say the norwegians or somebody like that rather than rather than putin one alternative solution is that you know if the chinese can work you know in terms of centuries decades and centuries then perhaps having a long-term view maybe sometime in the future russia will be in even more dire economic straits and if ukraine manages to produce a uh a prosperous and democratic society maybe at some point in the future crimea can come back to them under different conditions but i'm i'm i'm certainly very worried about uh the sort of thing that putin did in in crimea um in in the last part of our talk i would like to turn to two very interesting takes you had on the interaction between peace and economic development and peace and democracy so we talked a lot about foreign policy now i want to bring it back to human progress and um and you you say what do you say about peace and economic development um it's facilitating um so if you if you don't if you have internationally talked about the international peace of course obviously civil wars are not exactly helpful either but if you're if you're your friends in germany and you think the other you're going to go to war with that other country and then sometime in the next 20 years well you you know you know you don't really invest a whole lot in the other side um but basically you think it's going to be peaceful like this forever uh you might go over there and see if they can see you can sell something or buy something um and so consequently it's facilitating international um trade um assuming people believe in trade i mean if obviously everybody is an author or mercantilist uh then you can have peace but no one you know they they for other reasons what they think is the economic reasons they want to trade may i interrupt you for one second um so are you actually reversing in your thinking the relationship between economic development and peace because you know i i've read many people say that it is when countries become rich in other words when they economically develop that they become more peaceful but what you're really saying is that peace establishes the preconditions for economic development peace leads to economic development you reverse it correct right yeah peace peace the desire for peace is the causative independent variable uh for example no one would say the reason people are reversed to being killed by untouched uh oncoming traffic is because they're forced to drive on the right side of the street instead what you'd say is the reason they're forced to drive on the right-hand side of the street and they agree to do so because they don't want to be killed by oncoming traffic if you have peace then trade becomes fast facilitated maybe democracy development does too you don't necessarily need a strong man to protect you from an outsider so let me give you an example in this example would be the colon steel community um set up by you know a frenchman with a german name schumann in 1950. now he said in that the reason for the clone steel community to sort of try to combine the the economy to france and germany uh which of course eventually led to the whole european union and the common market um is because we don't want to go to war again and if we if we integrate our economies we want war against each other so some people say and gives examples that those kinds of agreements are the reason germany and france have not gone to war again after world war ii well what i'd ask them is to find me you know the french friend friends there's a lot of very clever people in france a lot of really clever people in germany and for centuries they use their club their study to figure out how to get into wars with each other they succeeded brilliantly in this war war after war after war now can you find anybody in either place standing on a soapbox saying you know we used to have a lot of wars here between france and germany that was really wonderful let's do it again anyway a politician a guy's uh drunk on this on a park bench anybody in france or germany saying let's let's do that war again so the idea that they have not gone to war because they have a stone coal and steel community or more trade strikes me as being as it backwards now they wouldn't go to war if they did have trade more trade and they wouldn't go to war if they didn't have trade they didn't go don't go to war because they don't want to go to war and that's the very much a positive uh development overall and do you make it if you're in favor if you're in favor of peace by the way if you think peace is bad of course it's a bad deal you make a similar point about the uh relationship between peace and democracy uh for the longest time i heard people say that if more countries are democratic then you are going to end up in a with a more peaceful world whereas what you are saying really is that if you have a lot of peace in the world democracies will mushroom correct uh well it it'll be facilitating uh they're facilitated you have to want to do it yes i don't see i've never subscribed to the democratic peace theory at the democracies what what happened is the democracy grew in the same area as an anti-war movement anti-war sentiment grew uh and also liberal economic thinking grew you know it started basically you know in manchester england and sort of spread to the world um so they're correlated uh the the war is a bad idea is correlated in time with the idea that economic freedom is a good thing and that international trade is a good thing that democracy is a good thing but i don't think an essay cause it if you keep having you know cases that don't have any of the prerequisites for example after 1975 uh quite surprisingly in many respects almost all of latin america became democratic and one of the cases i'd like to point to is paraguay now paraguay had never had democracy it always been a jesuit theocracy or a military dictatorship and so there's a fight the president was out of town out of the country and advice then took over and he said you know democracy is what everybody's wearing this year so don't come back and the president didn't and and then he went to an election and said okay vote for me and i'll make this into a democracy like all the other you know like chile and argentina and and other countries around here costa rica and they said okay do it and they did it and it's remained you know it's had iraqi moments but it's remained that way ever since it didn't have any prerequisites it didn't it didn't wasn't the maverick or democratic before it just said you know democracy is what people are wearing and uh we should we should be in that game and they have been that's absolutely fascinating i mean i think that people who buy a book and once again the book is the stupidity of war by john mueller i think that even people who disagree with you on some things um will find this this novel take on the correlation between economic development and peace and democracy and peace in itself a very important novel contribution to the discussions in the international relations discipline i certainly hope so so with that uh i want to thank you very much for spending time with me today um and uh hopefully i will see you at cato at some point in the near future thanks for the questions thanks for the interview and thanks for the time [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Human Progress

Views: 706

Keywords: Innovation, Human Progress, progress, Libertarianism, Freedom, Milton Freedman, Liberty, Free Market, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Liberal Democracy

Id: 6hhCvSNHpt8

Length: 55min 30sec (3330 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 02 2021