The DNA of War

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0:00:07.4 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Trevor Burrus. Joining me today is Andrew Heaton, award-​winning comedian, contributor to reason, former congressional staffer and a prime time television writer. He hosts the policy and comedy podcast, The Political Orphanage, the unlicensed History Podcast, Losers, Pretenders and Scoundrels and the science fiction podcast Alienating the Audience. Welcome back to the show, Andrew.

0:00:29.9 Andrew Heaton: Great to be back. Thank you for having me on.

0:00:32.6 Trevor Burrus: Now, today it’s gonna be a discussion of International Relations Theory, which is not the sexiest name, if we’re being honest for what it is.

0:00:41.9 Andrew Heaton: No, it’s not. This is why IR people should not be in charge of branding.

[chuckle]

0:00:47.2 Trevor Burrus: Very few people should be in charge of branding their own stuff, let’s be honest.

0:00:51.5 Andrew Heaton: Agreed. Plus IR people like… So I’ve got a master’s degree in this, Trevor, and I can tell you, IR people are not… Not only are they bad at branding, they’re also really bad at writing. Because a lot of this is in academia, and I don’t… I assume this is all of academia and not just international politics, but I came and got this degree right after I’d been working for Congress, and I would read this dense, dense jargon and I would go, I would be fired if I had handed this in to the congressman. Because rightly, the congressmen would have gone, you took eight pages to say what could have been said in two pages, and you used a bunch of unnecessarily large words to convince me that you’re smart. But the point of this wasn’t to prove you’re smart, the point of this was to communicate an idea. Academia, particularly at the master’s agree at PhD level, a lot of them aren’t trying to communicate an idea, they’re trying to communicate how smart they are.

0:01:42.7 Andrew Heaton: I on the other hand, know I’m a little bit of an idiot, Trevor, [chuckle] and I don’t mind sounding like an idiot. I’m a clown, it’s my job to be a clown, so I don’t care if you won’t think I’m smart or not, and I can translate to a regular human.

0:01:55.1 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, we have to know these terms, people throw them about, and of course, IR is always relevant, but it’s quite relevant now with Russia invading and still fighting a war in the Ukraine.

0:02:07.5 Andrew Heaton: Yeah. And the way I think that we should label it is, don’t call it IR theory, which sounds very boring. We’re talking about the DNA of war. We’re talking about the molecular root cause of conflict between countries, how to mitigate that and how to predict stuff. That’s what we’re talking about, which is interesting and relevant.

0:02:26.4 Trevor Burrus: It’s interesting, one of the things you said in his podcast and in Andrew’s podcast, which we’ll link in the short notes here, to kinda go before we get into the different theories, is that before getting into this, you should kind of set aside your domestic ideology. So if you’re a free market person, if you’re a person who believes in a robust social safety net or whatever in between, then these are not necessarily in the same spectrum as whatever your international relations theory is, that you could have very, very different or the same… These two people who… Two groups, one who believes in a robust social safety net, and one who thinks that the welfare state should be abolished, actually have the same international relations viewpoint.

0:03:12.7 Andrew Heaton: Very much. You’re absolutely right, and I’m glad you preface that. The terms that we’re gonna be using do not have a causal relationship with their usage in normal day-​to-​day political conversation at the domestic level. And a great example of this, and don’t nobody take a swing at me, nobody get mad at me, there’s actually, I find a lot of intellectual overlap between Marxists and libertarians when it comes to IR theory. Now, the reason for that is that when we’re talking about Marxism and in domestic political economy, we mean class warfare and trying to empower the proletariat by giving the state control of industry. That’s what Marxists we are talking about… But when we’re talking about at the IR level, what Marxism really means is the root cause of conflict is economic, and so, people that have a Marxist view in International Relations Theory are looking at the war in Iraq and saying that was about oil, as opposed to liberals who would say, that was about spreading democracy. Failing, but attempting to spread democracy, right?

0:04:12.7 Andrew Heaton: A liberal, which again, is different than in the context in America, a liberal is gonna look at Ukraine and say, This is about NATO, the European Union, the clash of civilizations. Whereas a Marxist is gonna go, no, this is about Gazprom and about opening up markets. And were there is significant overlap between libertarians and Marxists is, if you just put the word crony in front of capitalist, all of a sudden, Ron Paul and the Marxists agree with each other on virtually everything, right? It’s just that Ron Paul thinks capitalism works but it’s actually capitalism, whereas the Marxists think it’s bad and nasty and always exploitative, but… So there is a lot of work there, a lot of overlap there. And at the same time, ’cause I don’t wanna… Something that I’ll caution you on, I assume that your audience is very… Given that’s on Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say most of your listeners are Libertarian…

0:05:00.4 Trevor Burrus: Friendly.

0:05:01.5 Andrew Heaton: Or are like…

0:05:03.8 Trevor Burrus: Yes.

0:05:05.1 Andrew Heaton: Eight or nine hyphenates to say why they’re not Libertarian, but they have the exact same… But you’re broadly speaking, everybody’s listening is in the Libertarian camp. You’re gonna find elements of all of these theories that you relate to. So I would caution you don’t just be careful about the terminology, give yourself the mental breathing room to not try to figure out how to apply your Libertarianism to these theories, because they really are separate, and you have an opportunity to think for yourself and think anew and not just try to glom on to what strikes you as Libertarian. ‘Cause as you’ll see, there’s a lot of commonality with liberalism as well, which is about markets and about democracy and the liberals, again, different than domestic liberals, IR liberals, see their founding fathers as John Locke and Adam Smith, who are Libertarian heroes, right? So you get to kind of… You get to piece together your own cool boutique world view when we get into this.

0:05:58.5 Trevor Burrus: Well, let’s do that, let’s start with the one that it seems in my life has been most discussed or which is realism, or is like the backdrop theory to some extent.

0:06:10.8 Andrew Heaton: Yeah. I think you’re right…

0:06:13.3 Trevor Burrus: Where people modify it, and especially in the 20th century, which is of course, when we get this entire field of IR to come into play, but realism and the two cataclysmic world wars that we had, they kind of played together a causal relationship there.

0:06:29.4 Andrew Heaton: Yeah. And backdrop theory is a really good way to describe that, because realism is kind of the fundamental backdrop theory. I am increasingly coming to the position that the other theories don’t so much disagree with realism as they want to tack on an asterisk. So, realism is that it’s not an idea that there is no global policeman, there is no global mayor or court system or anything like that. States are all interacting with each other in an anarchy, like the Wild West, and everybody’s got guns trained at each other, we’re in a Mexican stand-​off, we all kinda wanna shoot each other and take the other guy’s cards and go to the next town and blow it on the brothel or whatever. We don’t trust each other and we’ve all got guns on each other, and we’re… Maybe I’m forming a coalition with Trevor, because we’re gonna make sure the Black Cats don’t take our money ’cause we’re White Hats or whatever, but that’s kinda the root thing.

0:07:21.6 Andrew Heaton: And so, in that view, what realists will say is, if we’re investigating the DNA of war, the DNA of war is power dynamics, that the principal player we’re discussing is the nation state, the Westphalian nation state, and they operate like billiard balls, and the physics which is animating them is just power dynamics. That if you got one really big… If Hungary is getting very big, then Austria is gonna gang up with Prussia to try and stop Hungary. If Germany… Or if Prussia and Austria unite and form some kind of German-​speaking Union, well, then France and England might gang up to try and stop that from happening, but ultimately what we’re talking about is power dynamics. And when we get into ideology, when we get into economics, these things are trivial in comparison to that, and in on the billiard ball analogy, they’re like the stripes or solids. They’re really not material in terms of what we’re discussing.

0:08:14.2 Andrew Heaton: Now, I do think you’re right, Trevor, that that is kind of the backdrop theory to all this, because I don’t think liberals would contest that. What liberals would say, Yes, but that… Yes, power dynamics are the predominant thing we’re discussing here, we’re not gonna disagree with that, but whereas a realist would say, power dynamics, you know, it’s just the military power between nation states is 90% of what we’re talking about. A liberal would go, then let’s say 70%, but there is a remaining 30% that’s still important, that you need to acknowledge and that that’s gonna make a material difference.

0:08:49.4 Trevor Burrus: The interesting thing, that I’m gonna bring… Gonna maybe jump ahead in some sense, not necessarily, we have this outline, but what you just… The analogy you used, the examples you just gave of if Austria and Germany get together, maybe France and England will try to get together too, but there’s a backdrop there, which is the social constructivism thesis that I feel like is being almost assumed, which is that, well, why Austria and Germany and not Austria and Italy? There are German-​speaking parts of Italy, but not most of Italy. So why would these nations happen to be the ones that form together? And I think that’s an important thing. We can’t take it for granted, and that stuff of course, changes over time, but that’s the social constructivism. As there are historical ties, there are language ties, there are religion ties that make certain groupings make more sense than other groupings.

0:09:42.8 Andrew Heaton: Right, I’m glad that you did that, ’cause I’ve now done this style of interview several times in the last week, nobody else, Trevor has brought up social constructivism to the point where I just do it at the end, like, by the way, there’s a thing like social constructivism then that I move on. Yeah, so whereas, realism is concerned with power dynamics, social constructivism says, we are very concerned with individuals and relationships. So, power… Like realism, think Otto Von Bismarck think Cardinal Richelieu. Think of people who are looking at a map of Europe and going, I don’t care about anything other than the size of your army and the army coming after me, and I’m gonna team up with people to fight the bigger army… That’s realism in a nutshell. Social constructivism is going, Yes, but yes, that’s… Yes, but the fact that you Otto Von Bismarck are in a German-​speaking country, and I who live in Bavaria, I’m a German-​speaking principality, we have separate armies, but we have some commonality here that’s gonna make us predisposed towards each other more than we would be towards France, and a more modern example we could do is Canada and Cuba are not the same country as America, there are were three separate countries, but if Canada suddenly doubles its military defense spending, America is not really gonna freak out about that if Cuba did maybe we would think about that.

0:11:04.5 Andrew Heaton: If… Given how massive our military budget is, let’s say… We don’t care either way. And we think it’s cute. If Britain suddenly doubles the amount of nuclear missiles they have… We’re not gonna care about that. If North Korea doubles the amount of nuclear missiles they have, we are gonna care about that, and social constructivism comes in, and it points out these various relationships across the board, there’s ethnic relationships, they’re shared history. We share a border with Mexico and Canada, I actually don’t know what the trade relations are, we might have more trade with Mexico, I don’t really know, but I think broadly, the average American that speaks English as their first language probably feels more of a commonality with Canada than we do with Mexico, even though we are separate countries. You have this religiously where historically, England might feel more inclined to team up with the Netherlands and the German principalities than with France because it’s Catholic, and you might have situations where Muslim countries feel more inclined to hang out than not, you have dynastic relationships where my cousin is the arch, is the queen of France, so I’m less likely to go in that kind of thing.

0:12:15.6 Andrew Heaton: So the problem with social constructivism is it is so granular as to not be useful predictively, I think, which is why it’s really not a massive theory within American foreign policy circles nor anywhere else that I can think of, because with realism you can go… Well, if it’s all billiard balls, we know that if Ukraine dramatically increases its military, it’s probably gonna provoke Russia, we can look at that and make a reasonable inference from that with liberalism, which we’ll talk about in a minute, we can say if there’s an authoritarian regime over here, we know that authoritarian regimes and democratic regimes don’t like each other, and don’t trust each other, so we can infer that if this authoritarian regime is becoming more authoritarian, there’s an increased likelihood of conflict between its neighbors that are democratic. Social constructivism is so… There are so many factors there that it’s almost just good after the fact to explain why something didn’t work. I would call the social constructivist when you’re about to launch the tanks, call them and be like, hey, we’re about to invade this country, does this seemed like a good idea to you, because they’re gonna come in and go, Oh no, you shouldn’t do…

0:13:17.0 Andrew Heaton: Okay, no, no, no, no, no, no, because they’re all Lutherans, and whatever the thing is, I think where social constructivism actually kinda comes in handy is, in the 2000s looking at, say, terrorism on the global stage, terrorism is difficult to understand as a realist because terrorists don’t have nation states like terrorism is a tactic, it’s not a thing and however eventually you get ISIS, right, but like Al Qaeda wasn’t a state. So it’s difficult to take a Bismarckian and mindset about alliances and military build-​up and deterrence. How does deterrence effect terrorists like you’ve got more tanks… Well, but that’s not gonna stop terrorist from suicide bombing, social constructivism is good for that kind of thing, it’s almost like good for non-​state actors, good for marginal thinking, Good for really dealing into the nuance once you’ve already got the situation established…

0:14:08.0 Trevor Burrus: Well, that’s another question that is still setting the scene, or at least on assumptions that we use, which is the nature of the nation state, and particularly this concept of sovereignty, because it’s not clear to me that the… All of these of theories work within the concept of the nation state, at least being the primary actor of what… But this is a relatively new idea, it’s about 300 years old, and that before the way of doing international relations was a to ignore the nation state and the concept of sovereignty, but then after Westphalia we have the first IR theory, which is that all these groups that were fighting this bloody 30 years war decided to just sort of stay on their own side of the fence, and then everyone pretends that there’s some sort of impermeable thing called sovereignty that we all have to respect, even though these nation states themselves carved out of imperfect lines and imperfect ethnic, very ineffective barriers in modern IR firstly, it seems necessary that we just have to think about the nation state first, and you call them billiard balls, which is a good way, it’s like they’re all the same on the inside. At least in realism, they’re all the same.

0:15:25.3 Andrew Heaton: In realism, they are. Yeah.

0:15:26.4 Trevor Burrus: But sovereignty itself is… I we use it, but it’s somewhat ill-​defined in terms of when you’re allowed to do… To use sovereignty…

0:15:36.1 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, and you sound very much like a social constructivist at the moment, because social constructivists would point that out, that social constructivists are concerned with ideas and norms and taboos and things like that. So one of the things that social constructivists would point out is, we’re in this anarchic system, we’re in the a big Mexican stand-​off, okay? No one feels real comfortable using nuclear weapons to… Not like that, we would have thought twice about dropping them on Vietnam, we could have, but there would have been such an incredible social outcry domestically and globally, no one uses gas. That’s been a thing since the… Like World War that you just don’t do that. Countries generally claim to not assassinate foreign officials. That is the claim, anyway. And then beyond that, all of them agreed to the concept of a Westphalian nation state, which is this interesting thing, as you rightly point out, Trevor, it is a fiction, like it’s an abstract concept. For the record, before all the anarchists start cheering, so is Tuesday, so is Sunday. So is the concept of latitude and longitude lines, we made them all up, but they could can be useful, but nation states are made up.

0:16:40.3 Andrew Heaton: They’re not a real thing. There’s they are something that’s fairly new and in how we think… We didn’t used to think that way. You used to be some peasant that spoke German, but your Lord lived in France. And like there is a much more complicated soupy of looking at that. So a social constructivist would go, right like one of the norms that we have, that we made up in the same way that we have a norm about not gassing people in trenches anymore, and that’s not acceptable from warfare. One of the other norms is We all pretend nation states are a thing, and as a result, we’re gonna act and do these things, and that is really entrenched in American thinking in particular, we are very nation-​state oriented, partly because we are a polyglot culture, we are not to our great credit, we are not an ethno state nor should we be, but you can look at a lot of European countries that are effectively ethno states or were ethno states for a very long time, and so for them, they maybe not the nation-​state bit is not as important as the nation bit because they’ll think of themselves as we’re all tall, blue-​eyed blond dutch people, right.

0:17:40.0 Trevor Burrus: Speaking of Serbia, for example which does happen to be a nation state.

0:17:45.2 Andrew Heaton: Serbia yeah.

0:17:45.3 Trevor Burrus: But there was a long period of time that they were just a people, a nation.

0:17:48.6 Andrew Heaton: Right, right. Or one of the interesting things that I find in history is there’s this bizarre thing that we now have, and we’ve had it since Westphalia where if you make a treaty with the a regime, you are making a treaty with that nation in perpetuity, regardless of who the regime is so like… But that makes sense in an American context where the Senate signs of treaty and then a new Senate comes in, the old Senate acknowledges that the institution itself persists and that you have the president of your company has gone away, but there’s a new president and so the contract is still legally binding, but does that really apply when Britain makes a deal with the Emperor of China, and then the Republicans come in and murder the emperor, and then the commies come in and kick the Republicans out and they go to Taiwan, who owns that deal?

0:18:38.6 Andrew Heaton: And for whatever reason and in International Relations, we now act as though, not permanently, like if you made a deal with like Russia, like Putin, up till recently was paying off World War I debt, which makes no sense, like World War One that’s under the Tsar. There’s been a Tsar, there’s been the communists that killed the Tsar, and now there’s whatever Putin is, but Russia was still on the hook for it, and that is this bizarre norm that operates and a good example of social constructivism of like, right ideas do matter, they do govern these things. We are, to some extent, making up the physics and then we act. Much like money. We made up money, and now it has real force.

0:19:11.4 Trevor Burrus: Well, that’s a good segue, getting into liberalism, liberal institutionalism a little bit more in terms… ’cause that also, to some extent, is based on people believing at least some ideals, some ideas that end up mattering and that we can do something to stop war other than just getting a bigger and bigger and bigger club than the other guy has.

0:19:31.0 Andrew Heaton: Yeah. And this is one of those things where I think everybody sort of likes to think of themselves as a realist because it sounds gritty and pragmatic, you feel like you’re John Wayne slamming your drink on the table and going, “Damn it! We’ve gotta actually… ” Whatever the thing is. Like liberal share quite a lot of intellectual overlap, libertarians. You would know this far better than me, Trevor, so I’m not even gonna fight you on this or argue with on this, but it seemed to me that the Libertarian movement’s really two different movements that are joined together. You have classical liberals who are coming out of the enlightenment, this would be Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, people like that, Montesquieu, Montaigne, all those guys. And you have anarchists which are coming out of a different intellectual tradition, they’re a different set that Michael Malice wrote a whole book on that, and it’s not drawing on social contract theory, right?

0:20:24.4 Andrew Heaton: So if you’re from that Adam Smith side of this, if you’re from the enlightenment side of this, Montaigne, founding fathers, all that stuff, then that same intellectual lineage goes into liberalism as an IR theory. And the two-​fold elements of that are… There was a thought process that I think I agree with, and many people agree with, that countries that trade together are less likely to go to war. That economic relationships mitigate conflict because the actors involved in them don’t wanna lose their money. If I’ve got an industry in France that relies on raw materials in Germany, it’s not in my benefit to go to war with Germany because you’re gonna disrupt that supply chain, I’m probably gonna lose my money. And so a modern corollary to this, Walmart is the largest trading partner with China.

0:21:15.8 Andrew Heaton: The company Walmart is a larger trading partner with China than any nation state on Earth. And so noting that Walmart is headquartered in Arkansas, it’s unlikely that China is gonna go to war with the United States because it would be economic suicide for China to do so, and I don’t think it would help us very much either. So liberals come in and go, open markets, free markets, something that libertarians like, something that I am a big fan of. Open markets and free markets are apt to create that interconnectivity that makes warfare a less appealing way to try and engage your resource accumulation. That made sense, like pre-​Westphalian state where you’re just a baron who’s trying to conquer somebody else’s County and you get all their serfs, now you get to squeeze money out of them through predation. It doesn’t make a lot of sense in a modern economy, and the more we can have an interconnected global economy, the less likely we’re gonna have conflict.

0:22:02.0 Andrew Heaton: Now, the corollary to this that is also coming about at the same time is the idea of democratic peace. This is coming out with, I think Immanuel Kant and some of the other guys who were going… Part of this was demonstrably refuted, where you can see these thinkers early on, where they’re going, “Well, people are engaging in war because these barons don’t care. We’re all just little toy soldiers and things. If people could vote on war, they would never vote to go to war. Cut to World War I, cut to World War II. It turns out bougie people a lot of the time like having their ego connected to the nation state that they’re a part of, and they like the idea of beating other ones. That’s not true. But there’s still some salient there in that democratic regimes do experience war wariness more quickly than other ones do. So if we are a democratically elected country and we are going to work and now we’re not really sure why we’re there, but we have rationing and our taxes are higher and our teenagers keep getting killed, we’re more apt to go, “You know what? Screw it, I’m gonna vote for the other guy next time,” and we’re more apt to stop a war from happening.

0:23:08.8 Andrew Heaton: And that is not gonna happen in an authoritarian regime. In an authoritarian regime, there’s no accountability or less accountability is just a question of whether you get toppled or not, but you’re not really worried about winning the mid-​term elections. There’s also the idea that autocrats are more likely to be belligerent according to liberal theory, the idea that they’re more apt to solve things, they are more apt to try and shore up popularity domestically by going to war. And so part of liberal IR theory, liberals will acknowledge that as a result of all of this liberal governments, which… I’ll back up. Liberals then think to put this all together, democracy and markets are gonna mitigate against conflict. The basically the more countries that join the free world, the less likely there is to be war. That if you are a democratic country that has trade relations with other democratic countries, you are much less likely to go to war than a authoritarian regime is. It’s possible, it’s less likely.

0:24:05.0 Andrew Heaton: And so the liberal solution to all of this is to build institutions to enfranchised other nations into the free world. We’re going to have the WTO to get people involved in open markets, we’re going to have the European Union to stop European countries from building up their arms are going to war with each other, we’re gonna have NATO, so that the Atlantic Alliance maintains Britain, America, and Europe on the same military page, we’re not worried about building up armaments between our borders because we’re all on the same page. We’re all part of the same institution. That’s what the liberals are doing, and as a result, the experiment that liberals oftentimes engage in is a kind of crusade to promote liberalism, IIE the war in Iraq, the idea that if we can go in and do some regime changing and get rid of this authoritarian thug and push democracy into this country, it will join our wonderful world, and then Frances Fukuyama will pop his champagne cork and shout, “Hazaa! History has ended. Everyone sees the Federation is better than the Klingon Empire, and we’ll come into it.” And so liberals will acknowledge that that kind of… Does spark a crusader mindset in liberal regimes. And you see a lot of the time, there is this friction between liberal regimes and democratic regimes, because liberal regimes do not view democratic regimes as legitimate, and are more likely to go in and try and topple ‘em, put in our guy.

0:25:22.9 Trevor Burrus: After reviewing this, and I was struck by the fact that what really seems arguably at one level, what seems to have had created the post-​war peace that we’ve experienced, which has been pretty profound, and we did have a Cold War, but it didn’t result in super hot wars and for about 30 years now, we’ve had it going, the amount of hot wars, there’s a fair amount of civil wars, but has gone down to the point that I think it’s one reason why for so many westerners, the Russian invasion of the Ukraine of Ukraine felt surreal, because it seemed like war is a thing that we left behind.

0:26:00.6 Andrew Heaton: We’ve been out of this…

0:26:01.8 Trevor Burrus: Yeah.

0:26:02.3 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, why are you playing risk?

0:26:05.1 Trevor Burrus: Exactly.

0:26:05.2 Andrew Heaton: We were done with that.

0:26:05.7 Trevor Burrus: We were stopping that, and therefore the liberal institutionalism might have kind of demonstrated its value, and one of the reasons that realism seems less likely to be true is that at least the period of time when the US was a unipolar power in the entire world, all these other nation states just accepted it. I mean, maybe not Russia, and maybe China was biting its time, but Germany didn’t try to build back up its army, he didn’t seek coalitions saying, ’cause that would be what realism would predict, correct?

0:26:37.9 Andrew Heaton: Right.

0:26:38.4 Trevor Burrus: You would not just let American sit around as the biggest bully on the block, so maybe the UN and all these institutions that sometimes libertarians are prone to making fun of, maybe they actually have… They’re effective, they’re not maybe great at peacekeeping and they don’t have an army, but there’s some nature of those institutions, and the iterative game that happens, that means that they’re actually more effective than the cynics would think so.

0:27:05.0 Andrew Heaton: Yeah. And you’re absolutely right about that. The conclusion of the Cold War largely discredited realists for a generation. Where, like you can go back and read realist talking about how the Soviet Union will outlast Coca Cola. And like that was not the case. You literally have Gorbachev doing a Pizza Hut commercial in my lifetime. So that was not the case. Yeah, according to classic realist theory, nation states are going to achieve some kind of equilibrium. That if you’ve got one big guy and a bunch of little guys, the little guys are gonna band together to stop the big guy from pushing ‘em around. And you had during World War I and World War II, you had a multi-​polar world where there’s a bunch of great powers, there’s France and Germany and Russia and so on and so forth. And then during the Cold War, you went from a multi-​polar world to a binary world of two super powers and the world was bandwagoning, which is a realist perspective, around these two superpowers. Either you were the Soviet Union or the America or you were, generally speaking you were in one of their two orbits.

0:28:09.1 Andrew Heaton: And according to realist theory, and you can see this, the conclusion of the Cold War, realists were like, “Well, that’s it. Germany and France are gonna make a come back,” because in ’92 or ’88 whenever that was, the two countries that seemed to have the most kick-​ass economies and had previously had the most kick-​ass armies were Japan and Germany, so it was the thought that like, yeah, when Russia is now wheezing and falling over and dying, these two countries are gonna rise, and that didn’t happen. What we ended up happening for about 20 years is what a man named John Ikenberry, who’s a liberal theorist called the American system, and that we lived in a unipolar world in which America had just become a global hegemon and nobody… There are terrorist throwing rocks at us, but there’s no one seriously thinking about, in any way countermanding the military hegemony of the United States and the American system. And there was this kind of a nice idea for a while that countries were getting with the program. China was liberalize its markets. That’s the reason China is wealthy today, because they quit being such dumb commies, and they were to some extent liberalizing their government.

0:29:12.7 Andrew Heaton: Russia seemed like it was friends with us again, and so realism looked like it had been proven wrong, and liberalism was the way to go. And I think realists are basically now saying, “Right, it wasn’t gonna be immediate, there was gonna be a period of re-​adjustment, but ultimately the world is going to go back to its default position, which is one of realism.” So to the discredit and to the credit of liberals. Liberals used to be called idealists, where there was overlap with idealist, and I won’t go fully into this, but there’s significant overlap in the form of Woodrow Wilson, “Hold back your bile libertarians, aye, we all agree, yes, yes.” Woodrow Wilson. But in terms of the IR contributions he had, he started the League of Nations, which was an attempt to ban war and it went disastrously wrong. American never even joined, World War II happened, so it’s completely useless in that regard.

0:30:05.9 Andrew Heaton: And realists point to that and go, “This is stupid.” And I think realists and libertarians can both look at the United Nations and say, “This is ridiculous,” like who do you have on the Human Rights Council? You’ve got Iran, Russia, and some, fill-​in-​the-​blank a stan country where they…

0:30:20.2 Trevor Burrus: Libya.

0:30:21.1 Andrew Heaton: Libya. Right. So you like, well, this is a joke, but it doesn’t matter because the most powerful guy at the United Nations is the dude who makes gift shop prices since he doesn’t have an army or the ability. I think that’s fair. But there are liberal institutions that have done a very good job that I think need to get a shout out. The European Union is a good example of this. Now, when I say that the European Union has done a great job, I’m not talking about technocrats are smarter than national governments and that kind of, we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about, is anybody seriously worried about Germany invading Belgium since the instigation of the European Union? Does anybody actually think Sardinia needs to defend itself against France? No, the answer is no.

0:30:58.6 Andrew Heaton: The European Union has been a wild success in terms of keeping Europe from fighting Europe. NATO I think is another good example of this. Now, we can talk about the efficacy of NATO and all these different things, but NATO’s been good at keeping Europe, America and Britain militarily on the same page, where we are not at all concerned with having defend ourselves from each other. There is no concern that the United Kingdom needs to worry about being invaded by America. There’s no concern Canada needs to be worried about it, right? Institutions have, to a great extent, bound these countries together, which is a liberal position. And everybody hates the WTO. I like the idea of the WTO, which is basically, if you’re in the WTO, you can’t charge people higher tariffs and other members of the WTO. Everybody has to have the lowest possible tariff applied to all members, which is good, ’cause I want open markets, I don’t want there to be any protectionism. WTO’s good against mitigating against that.

0:31:52.4 Andrew Heaton: So yeah, those are kind of the broad strokes against them. I don’t think the UN is a very good example of a liberal institution in terms of efficacy, however, I will give credit to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which I do think it’s been very good at stopping nuclear proliferation. They’re the ones that watch dog, the Nuclear Non-​Proliferation Treaty, and a couple of countries have backed out of that, notably Iran and North Korea, but a bunch of countries were like, “Yeah, we’ll give up nukes.” South Africa was a nuclear power, Ukraine was a nuclear power. And one of the things people are getting wrong right now is there’s the sort of purported idea that America promised we would defend Ukraine if they gave up their nukes, which is not what we promised. We promised we wouldn’t invade Ukraine if they gave up their nukes and we haven’t. And generally speaking, I’m gonna say probably best that less countries have nukes than more nukes. And these institutions have arguably been effective at doing that, which brings us to, unless you wanna go to a different direction, it kinda brings us to this fault line between the realists and the liberals and as far as Ukraine goes. Because…

0:32:56.3 Trevor Burrus: Now that’s exactly where I was going next. Yes.

0:32:58.6 Andrew Heaton: Great. This is…

0:33:00.5 Trevor Burrus: On one level of the way you’ve described liberalism seems like the liberal world order, the democratic world order, ganging up on this petty autocrat.

0:33:08.1 Andrew Heaton: Yes.

0:33:08.2 Trevor Burrus: But, there’s also, there’s the peer realism, which is arguably what Putin is playing.

0:33:12.9 Andrew Heaton: Yes.

0:33:14.3 Trevor Burrus: And so there’s a kind of conflict there that Putin is just purely a realist in terms of how much he feels threatened by encroaching institutions around him.

0:33:21.5 Andrew Heaton: That is very much my take. My take from where I’m at is, I think liberalism is… To go back, they’re not completely antithetical to one another, I think liberals, if you really get into it, are effectively realists plus nuance, and they’re saying, realists are saying, “It’s 90% power, 10% who gives a shit.” And liberals are going, “It’s 70% power, but it’s 30% economics and it’s 30% the type of regime you have,” so yes, power is very important, but it’s not universally decisive.

0:33:52.3 Andrew Heaton: Where I’m at, I think liberalism is very useful in terms of keeping allies allies. So if we’re talking about how to keep France and Germany buddies, liberalism is good for that, and it’s useful for that, and the institutions that liberals have built are good and useful for that. Realism is really good for analyzing thugs, and I think that that’s what we should be doing, and as you point out, I do not think Vladimir Putin is going home and reading Ikenberry or John Locke or whatever. I do not think he’s… I think he’s looking at this in terms of guns, and he’s looking at this in terms of money, and I think the Chinese are doing the same thing, and I think authoritarian regimes in particular should be understood in terms of realism. And this is where this, it goes from being academic to being a practical implementation of this, because there are mutually exclusive interpretations of how we should be dealing with Ukraine based on what your world view is at this point.

0:34:40.9 Andrew Heaton: A lot of the time they’re in sync with one another, you could be a realist or a liberal during the Cold War and still be opposed to the Soviet Union, but now they’re apart. Because if you are a realist, you look at the situation in Ukraine and you go, “That is a real shame that we pushed Russia into invading this country,” that doesn’t mean if you say that you think that Putin is a good guy. It means that you think he’s a rational guy. So if I say, “I don’t think Darth Vader is crazy, does not mean I think Darth Vader is a good dude for blowing up Alderaan.” We’re allowing the Grand Moff Tarkin to blow Alderaan. I don’t wanna get a bunch of emails from your listeners who I’m confident, know a lot about Star Wars.

0:35:19.6 Trevor Burrus: They absolutely would. I was going to correct you, but…

0:35:22.6 Andrew Heaton: Then I did… Well, they’re all the same team, right?

0:35:23.9 Trevor Burrus: You corrected yourself it’s important.

0:35:27.4 Andrew Heaton: Grand Moff Tarkin and Vader are not good guys, but they are rational guys. So that’s what realists are saying about Putin. They’re not saying that if you’re analyzing the physics of the situation, that you like the billiard ball itself. Realists like John Mearsheimer look at the situation and go, basically, liberal hubris and a fixation on self-​aggrandizing ideological rhetoric has led to this unnecessary conflict in Ukraine in which a bunch of people are dying, and the closest thing to World War 3 we’ve had during my lifetime. And the reason they say this is under realist theory, again, it’s all about power, and it’s about zones of influence, and it’s about bandwagoning and such. So from Russia’s perspective, Ukraine is its historic backyard, and the historic backyard through which it’s always been invaded. It’s been invaded by Germany twice, it’s been invited by France once. Typically, it’s invaded more frequently from there, I guess the Mongols invaded it once from a different direction, but generally speaking to people that are worried about are coming in from its western… Yeah, western flank through Ukraine.

0:36:32.0 Andrew Heaton: And so, us making pretensions to enfranchise Ukraine into the Western order of NATO, the European Union, those are things that are deeply dangerous, disturbing to Russia, in the same way that if Vladimir Putin were to strike up a tripartite alliance between Russia, Mexico and Canada, we would view that as an existential threat. If Russia were putting in missile attachments in Vancouver and Puerto Vallarta and Baja California, we would freak out about that, and we wouldn’t let ‘em. We would definitely invade Canada and Mexico if they thought about doing that, without question. If Mexico wanted to, if Mexico was gonna let China put an air force bases in Baja California, we would seize Baja California.

0:37:14.3 Andrew Heaton: And that’s realists are saying, “Yeah, it turns out they’re playing by the same rules we are,” or rather they are concerned about the same things we are, notably existence. And that in the same way we’ve got the Monroe Doctrine and we’re definitely not gonna let people right in our backyard, team up with what we consider great power rivals, Russia feels the exact same way, feels equally threatened. And the timeline that they have, I think, works pretty well for that. They look and go, look, in 2008, George W. Bush in the throes of this post-​Soviet liberal utopia, Francis Fukuyama the West is one-​type thing goes, “Hey, the Cold War is over, it’s time we invited in Georgia and Ukraine.” And he says, declaratively, “It is not a question of if, it’s a question of when. TBD, we are inviting Ukraine to join NATO.” By all accounts, Vladimir Putin goes into a fury when this happens, a month later, he invades Georgia.

0:38:11.0 Andrew Heaton: Remember when McCain was talking about going into Georgia and we’re like, that happens a month after America says, we’re going to invite Georgia into… Which would be like Russia saying Manitoba is gonna join the Russian Federation. And ever since then, we’ve been slowly bringing Ukraine closer and closer to us, and I won’t go through the whole timeline here, but the most salient one recently is in November of last year, the American government, the Biden administration, several other governments, but most notably the Ukrainian government do naval military drills in the Black Sea, that would be as if Russia were doing naval drills in cooperation with Canada in Lake Superior. We would definitely take a dim view of that. And so the thinking in realist circles is we have needlessly provoked a fear response and arguable existential threat for the Russian Federation by threatening to bring Ukraine into our orbit. And so what has Russia done? It’s invaded Ukraine to wrench it back and either send a message that they’re not going to allow it or to fall on annex it or to topple their government and put in another guy, whatever.

0:39:15.7 Andrew Heaton: And then to put a button on this, Mearsheimer would also add that we are moving towards… We had our honeymoon period of the unipolar American system that is ending, we are now moving towards a new era of a tri-​polar world, where the great powers that dominate are Russia, America and China. And in this world, we don’t wanna be the odd man out, it would be better for us to figure out how to have a frenemy relationship with Russia and keep them from teaming up with China, than for them to be lockstep buddies playing footsie under the table while America begins to wane against these two rising powers, that’s where the realists are at. So they would say we should not… This was all avoidable, but now that we’re here, the best case scenario is for probably Ukraine to be neutral and to treat it like Finland and to go we promise not to bring it into NATO or the European Union, you guys promise not to invade them, and they’re gonna be kind of a… There’ll be just a zone between the two, it’s neutral at best.

0:40:13.9 Andrew Heaton: Liberals look at the situation and they say, “This is a conflict between an authoritarian regime and a democratic regime.” Russians are looking at an ethnically and linguistically similar, if not identical, people that live next door and going, “Hey, how come they get to have democracy, while we’re stuck with this dude riding horses without a shirt? If they can have a democracy, could we have a democracy? Like, why can’t we have a democracy? Could we just get rid of old Putin?” So Putin, according to liberals views Ukraine as a kind of existential threat because it is a beacon on the hill that shows an alternate universe in which Russia is not an authoritarian regime.

0:40:49.8 Andrew Heaton: And for that reason, he needs to snuff it out, this is kind of Cold War type thinking. They’re also looking at this going realist make a good point, but Ukraine’s asking to join our order, it’s not that we’re sending in tanks and conquering Ukraine to make it a satellite state of the American empire. It’s that they’re doing what the Baltic countries did, which is going, “Hey, Russia’s pushed us around for a thousand years, we would rather be in the group of people that doesn’t push us around, can we join your club?” And we have a responsibility to allow them to do so, and then you have a lot of people further going on going, “Look, these authoritarians keep wanting to light the world on fire, it would be much better for Ukraine to not be an authoritarian state, it’d be better for Ukraine to be a part of this system, so let’s get them in because maybe eventually, if we get in enough countries into this free world, these fires will quit lighting and they’ll be extinguished.

0:41:35.0 Andrew Heaton: So I don’t know that the liberals are full on saying we should enfranchise Ukraine into NATO in the EU, but they’re thinking about it. That was a big thing about a month ago now, three weeks ago now, where the EU had formally allowed Ukraine to enter the accession process, now I think that was probably lip service, but nonetheless they’re signalling that we are open to you joining our order as opposed to being neutral or part of the Russian Federation, so. And to make it very… What is it TLDR? This is a new thing I learned. TLDR, realists are saying give Russia its backyard and the conflict will go down, liberals are saying we need to add these trouble spots into the peaceful world of the free world with its markets and democracy, and these are juxtaposed to one another. You can’t have both.

0:42:26.9 Trevor Burrus: Well, and Putin is the other side of this too that is relevant in terms of what the concerns we would have is that Putin is not exactly a fan of democracy and liberalism, and if he were to go into the countries that he wants, he would make them much… They would be living autocratic regimes and he would be much poorer and they would be much poorer and living less fulfilling lives. And on that question though, because of the Putin being the way he is, I don’t know a ton about him, but a little bit, how much should we just be analyzing Putin? I mean, this is not… This is different than traditional IRA. This is…

0:43:11.1 Andrew Heaton: Practically speaking, which people at the Pentagon would be thinking about.

0:43:12.4 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, when it’s one person, when it’s not, these decisions made by more diverse institutions is just Putin decided to invade a country because he’s been reading Russian history apparently for two years and is super obsessed with his legacy in the dying Russian culture or the old Russian empire. Right, isn’t that where we just throw IRA out the window and say, No, this is just explaining what happened and why is this a method of explaining Vladimir Putin, it’s just a question of how you explain him.

0:43:42.9 Andrew Heaton: Maybe I would say that that hinges on how much you trust your psychological analysis of Vladimir Putin. So I would say on a domestic level, I don’t tend to trust that a whole lot, and what I mean by that is I am pretty… I am pretty reticent to look at people and go, I think he’s secretly a racist, and that’s why he did this thing, I don’t know, and I know that I have oftentimes been mis-​characterized with motivations that are not mine, because somebody outside of me thinks they can read my mind and see the inner machinations of my heart. This is not me trying to be nice to Vladimir Putin who I think is an authoritarian thug, and I hope he gets to Chestnut, I hope he doesn’t die in his sleep, I hope somebody kills him ’cause he’s a horrible human being and he’s an authoritarian and all the things I hate, so this is not pro Putin. However, I don’t trust the Putin analysis that much. They’re a little too convenient for me, the only one that I will give is there seems to be a pretty consistent through line, going back to at least Madeleine Albright, that he has a deep, deep sense of shame over Russia’s fall from power following the Soviet Union he told Madeleine Albright, we used to be a super power now we’re…

0:44:54.1 Andrew Heaton: How did he phrase it? Now we’re Bulgaria with missiles or something, I can’t… He picked some small country, I don’t remember which one. Now we’re Sardinia with missiles, and that seemed to be a real big ego blow to him, that seems to be a thing just based on all accounts, and that’s going back with everyone that I am aware of that’s met him in foreign policy circles, going back a long time. Where I get kind of squirely on it, as a lot of the old guard Neo-​Cons kinda just think he’s nuts. I’ve got a lot of neo-​con friends and they’re like, “He’s crazy and he knows he’s nearing his death, and so he wants to make his mark before he dies,” and I’m like, I mean, possible in the same sense that anybody could go crazy, but that just to me, seems a little convenient. Any time you don’t like a person and you’re like, “And he’s nuts.” I’m like I think that’s a good opportunity to re-​investigate the heuristics and mechanics through which you’re looking at something when you’re doing that, it seems to me… I can explain everything he’s doing based off of a realist framework. I don’t have to make any asterisks looking at him from realism, everything he’s doing makes total sense to me, when I put on my Otto Von Bismarck hat.

0:46:04.0 Trevor Burrus: I don’t really wanna have to go take a psychology course to understand Vladimir Putin and I’m not sure if I do that I truly will. Particularly given how opaque he is and how opaque that regime is, so I don’t know how useful that would be. I don’t know what we would do different based on that, other than I guess we all buy more canned goods, ’cause we might go to nuclear war ’cause he’s a mad man.

0:46:24.3 Trevor Burrus: And given this tool kit that we’ve been discussing, these frameworks, these ideas… Are you willing at all to at least at the maybe 30000-​foot view, make any predictions about what we should be looking for in… Maybe within different frameworks so far in the realist framework, if Putin’s a realist, then we should be looking for him behaving, continue to behave in this way and probably continue to go push maybe into the Baltics, definitely opposing Finland and Sweden entering NATO. That would be the realist position on that, although I’m not exactly sure why he views NATO as a threat since it’s not an offensive organization, but that’s a different question will stop his ability to do what he wants to do. So if we treat him as a realist, then we should be pretty maybe pessimistic about how far he wants to push it.

0:47:17.6 Andrew Heaton: Well, for one thing, just to clarify something, I hear this a lot, Putin shouldn’t be worried about NATO ’cause it’s a defensive organization. I am unaware of any significant difference between defensive guns and offensive guns, or defensive tanks and offensive tanks. If there were such a distinction where, “Oh, well, that tank only shoots that direction, it can’t possibly go the other direction, then sure,” but that’s not the case. And if I were a Russian, the Warsaw pact was formed in opposition to America, if the Warsaw Pact was still in existence, I would go… It seems to be an anti-​American club. NATO functionally is an anti-​Russian club, so I get why he views it with concern. In terms of… I’ll say the thing I have my eye on, I share John Mearsheimer’s concern about China and Russia teaming up. I don’t think Russia is nearly as powerful as the Neo-​Cons think.

0:48:07.5 Andrew Heaton: I think that it’s actually kind of a paper tiger. The fact that Ukraine is still going strong, it would be an indication that Russia’s not nearly as much of a military state as we thought it was, and then beyond that economically, it’s certainly not. Russia’s economy is $1.4 trillion, this is a smaller GDP than Italy. And I’m not worried about Italy. So I don’t think Russia is quite as big of a deal in terms of being a global threat as other people do, save the very big caveat of nuclear missiles, which could end all of mankind in any given moment.

0:48:39.4 Andrew Heaton: That said, I do think China is on the rise, and I think China is apt to start swinging around and started putting military bases in Africa. Historically China tended to be a regional player, it might very well have global pretensions, it might very well become a super power at some point. If that is the case, it would be very disadvantageous to the United States to be driving Russia and China into each other’s arms, and I fear that that is happening presently with these sanctions that we are doing, because China is not participating in the sanctions which means that we are forcing more trade to happen between these two countries, and I don’t think that’s good, I’d like some Nixon character to go over and be like, these Russians are saying some real racist stuff about you all, I wouldn’t… Me, I love anime. I don’t know, I probably say something racist here, I didn’t try to, someone who knows what they’re doing, to go over there and spark up some stuff to keep them on the same page, I think it would be a good thing. In terms of how it’s gonna play out in the meantime. I don’t think that Putin would go into the Baltics because I think he would if we were really interested about it, but I think that we’ve been pretty clear that we will not concede an inch of NATO territory. I think the American President, Trump thought about getting out of NATO. Biden is not thinking about doing that, and probably whoever replaces Biden is not gonna do that either.

0:49:55.6 Andrew Heaton: Trump was an interesting different episode in American foreign policy, and that everyone minus Trump in my lifetime has been a liberal in the IR sense Biden, George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Obama, all those guys, I don’t know as much about Reagan, but probably, but certainly everybody post-​Reagan for sure has been a liberal minus Trump. Right. So presuming that that happens with the next couple of presidential administrations, I don’t think anybody’s gonna go, “Yeah, actually the Baltic States are… They’re expendable.” I don’t see that happening, so I don’t see Putin trying to go into them. What I see happening is, I think there’s gonna have to be some face-​saving mechanisms for Ukraine, where Russia is gonna be able to declare victory, it’ll just redefine victory as however they want it they be like, “Well, our goal is, we’ve said from the beginning was to purge the Neo-​Nazis from the Eastern Provinces and having accomplished this mission accomplished,” and they’ll go home.

0:50:56.7 Andrew Heaton: Or it might involve NATO and America being the bigger man. And going, “Gosh, man, ooh. Russians are real powerful. Oh, you guys are just a Viagra commercial with guns. I couldn’t do that. There’s no way. Man, if we were in there, we would have been locked in a… Man, you’re power… God, but I bet you could bend a horseshoes around Vladimir Putin’s erections what a man he is,” and do that and then go, “Alright, well, here’s what, since you guys have clearly pulled the day off. Here’s what we… You would be doing us a solid if you just kept Crimea and then moved out of these places that keep killing you that have larger, older populations draining you of resources and allow the Ukrainian government to build,” whatever, I could see something happening like that.

0:51:37.8 Andrew Heaton: I think a fig leaf will be needed for him, and I don’t care, I don’t think that he’s… It’s not like we are gonna suddenly be destabilized by doing this, and I also don’t think that… I think all of the reports of Vladimir Putin barely holding out of power are wildly exaggerated. I read it, which I think is way more fun than Twitter and way more fun than Facebook. Reddit has all of these posts I keep saying about how like Vladimir Putin sent his mistress and their kids to be in Switzerland and there’s now taste testers and all these things, and the impression you get is that… And I read an article the other day that like the oligarchs had picked his successor, if they decide to whack him. Good luck with that. I don’t think that’s gonna happen.

0:52:19.2 Andrew Heaton: I think a billionaire sociopath with a couple of decades of entrenched power and a dash of paranoia, I don’t see him having a palace coup anytime soon, I certainly don’t see the Russian people rising up and getting him. On my show on The Political Orphanage, I do bonus episodes Behind the Paywall, my friend Maxum Lot, was just over there, he left during the shelling, he left during the conflict. He was in Moscow, I should say. He left when Moscow was shelling Ukraine. He’s maintaining relationships over there, and I was talking to him both about legitimately conducted polls in so far as they exist, and also maxim straw polls and the only portion of the population that thinks that the war is bad is 18 to 24 year old females. Everybody else thinks, broadly speaking, we should be over there.

0:53:12.0 Andrew Heaton: And the position on… Well, there are admirable people of Russia that are risking their livelihood, if not prison sentences, to oppose the war and oppose Putin’s regime, and my hat is off to them, they’re heroic and they deserve our praise. They are not emblematic of the country as a whole, what appears to be the country as a whole is one that is broadly resigned to Putin and not agitating to overthrow Saddam Hussein as Guy… I don’t see that happening. I think Putin is gonna be there for a while. It’d be great if that won the case, but I don’t think it’s gonna happen, so I think that they’re gonna reach a kind of stalemate and then have a fig leaf and leave. I think Ukraine has bloodied Russia’s nose so hard. I do not see a situation now where Russia just installs a puppet leader… I think that’s what they thought was gonna happen. I don’t think that’s gonna happen. I think that they’re gonna get a fig leaf, which is gonna be Crimea, maybe they’ll very likely the Donbas and the other Eastern Provinces that Russia seize that are majority ethnic Russian become an independent country.

0:54:19.2 Andrew Heaton: I don’t think Russia will want to annex them ’cause it won’t be worth it economically. So maybe something like that, and that’s what I think is gonna happen, but I’d say keep your eye on Russia and Ukraine. I think that’s something that could be a lot more dangerous in the future.

[music]

0:54:46.9 Trevor Burrus: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts. Or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.