<v SPEAKER_00>People need to understand that what happens in other places is important and that the only thing we know is that shoring up the institutions of other places is the only way to lead to long-term development.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so, like, if we're not gonna be creative and think hard about ways to be better and better at this, then we're just like resigning ourselves to a world where there are just like billions and billions of people like living in like poverty and causing problems, notably for us back home.

<v SPEAKER_01>Hi, I'm Matthew Iglesias.

<v SPEAKER_00>I'm Jerusalem Demsis.

<v SPEAKER_01>You're listening to The Argument, a new show where two friends we argue about politics, policy, and everything else that's on our mind.

<v SPEAKER_00>This week, Matt's actually upset about one of my takes.

<v SPEAKER_01>I wouldn't say I was upset.

<v SPEAKER_01>Okay.

<v SPEAKER_01>But I I didn't you you heard a piece and you said, you know, like we're gonna miss the sort of hypocritical idealism of American foreign policy now that we have this Trump cynicism.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I gotta say, like, I I really don't miss it.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, you clearly think the status quo is bad.

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, I think Trump's policies are bad.

<v SPEAKER_01>But I don't so I think you had a really good, like general defense of hypocrisy, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>And like the view that when there's a tension between stated ideals and real practice, you know, what you really need to do is like elevate to the ideals, which I mostly agree with.

<v SPEAKER_01>But in this case, I I don't.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, I think it is actually better that we are resetting the target towards something more like national interest.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I think that what's wrong with Trump's policies is that they're not advocating for America's interests, like this war he started with Iran.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's just like it's been really bad for Americans.

<v SPEAKER_01>And in some ways, I think that's clear.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like we can just have like a sane, sensible debate about whether this is helping us or doing any good for the country instead of like spiraling off into like 110 layers of, you know, oh, but the mullahs are so bad.

<v SPEAKER_01>And like they are bad, but who cares?

<v SPEAKER_00>Well, I think there are a few things.

<v SPEAKER_00>One is that I agree that a lot of the policy, um, foreign policy decisions I would like to see happen are almost entirely justifiable under American self-interest.

<v SPEAKER_00>Things around what you would want to see in Sudan, what you would want to see with us pressuring the UAE to stop funding, like uh, you know, horrible groups in Sudan, whether you want what you want to see with multilateral cooperation in peacekeeping operations in Haiti, like these are things that are largely justifiable through through self-interest.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I do think at some level, like a it's notable to me that the time when there were these liberal ideals is the time when we saw like the most amount of international peace and increased democratization.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like you saw many, many countries being brought into the fold.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I think this normative framework of like you should care about other people in other countries is actually like a positive one.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like how much you should care and what you should do with that, I think these are like policy disputes.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like the value of having not just the United States on its own, but like an international culture of saying, like, it's really bad when people are like murdered in other countries for no reason.

<v SPEAKER_00>Or that's like that's like these are these are moral things that we think are are bad actions that we hold people to account eventually, hopefully in some way, if they do war crimes.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like these are just good ideals, I think.

<v SPEAKER_01>Well, okay, but so like who's we?

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, I mean, you and I, like we are a we.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yes.

<v SPEAKER_01>And so, you know, you can ask my opinion about things.

<v SPEAKER_01>And, you know, I'm a I'm a person.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, I think bad things are bad, good things are good.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, it's quite many bad things happen in the world outside America's borders.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I think it's completely correct for people to like exert good judgment about that.

<v SPEAKER_01>But I mean, you were talking, I mean, you you raised hypocrisy, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like it's why I thought it was an interesting article.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, you weren't saying, oh, until Trump, like everything America did in the world was amazing and like it was all flowers and sweets, and everything worked out, and like now it's bad that Trump isn't doing that anymore, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah, I mean, there's the and I think that like, as you said, there's a value to this in many contexts.

<v SPEAKER_00>So in in the piece I wrote, which was about um, you know, I'm I was born in Ethiopia, but my family's Eritrean, and you know, after the Allied powers were figuring, after World War II, the Allied powers were figuring out what to do with um Italy's African colonies.

<v SPEAKER_00>And um, you know, it's complicated, but Libya and Somalia basically eventually got to be independent, you know, self-determinated states.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, but with Eritrea, um, the US basically said, like, from the principles of you know, justice, that we think it's probably good to care that the Eritrean people want to be separate and have developed a separate national identity and like have different languages and whatever and culture and different level of development, and they have a parliament, like whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>But at the same time, we are engaged in like a Cold War conflict, or we're about to be engaged in a Cold War conflict, and Ethiopia is our ally in the region.

<v SPEAKER_00>We want to make sure the military communications um and the ports um and the uh uh you know base uh along the Red Sea that Eritrea uh has is controlled by Ethiopia.

<v SPEAKER_00>So they supported Ethiopia in basically doing um uh a massive oppression campaign within Eritrea, which led to a bunch of deaths, but also notably in the article, Ethiopia becomes communist.

<v SPEAKER_01>So thus not to like totally derail, but I I think like some of these facts are interesting.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um I would say that I have a, you know, relative to the mass American public uh above average exposure to Ethiopian and Eritrean ancestry people.

<v SPEAKER_01>I'm in DC, uh my son's school has a lot of um East African immigrant families, but it's still I I think not something people are super familiar with, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>So Italy had these colonies in the Horn of Africa.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>And they tried at one point to extend their colonial rule into what's today, well, I guess was Ethiopia then and is Ethiopia today.

<v SPEAKER_01>Uh, they failed in that.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so then they were able to hold the sector of Ethiopia that was called Eritrea.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>And but then they they lost, I mean, every they lost World War II.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Famously.

<v SPEAKER_01>So then you're gonna sort of get what happens.

<v SPEAKER_01>At that time, like the Allied powers had big colonial empires in Africa, but it was kind of going out of style, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>So they could have given these Italian colonies like to Britain or France or something like that, or they could set them up as independent countries.

<v SPEAKER_01>Or in the case of Eritrea, the American government decided to give it to Ethiopia, who wanted that land, both because like Ethiopia is landlocked and they wanted access to the sea, but also the the ethnic, like Eritrean is and Ethiopian aren't linguistic groups, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>So there's people, um, I'm probably saying Tingrinya.

<v SPEAKER_01>Tigrinya.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah, who like live on both sides of the border and speak the same language.

<v SPEAKER_00>So the Ethiopian view was like Well, I mean, anyway, I don't mean to get to the details.

<v SPEAKER_00>I could do an entire like hour and then my father would call me and tell me everything I got wrong.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so we don't need to like set me up for uh familial strife right now.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think that like the the important thing here is exactly what you're saying is that like World War II is a war that in part is fought because Hitler violates national boundaries.

<v SPEAKER_00>And it's justified that you know a lot of European countries should go into the war because he's going to have an expansionary um attitude that goes beyond just, of course, this is a Dayton land beyond Austria, like whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like and so it's it's a little bit then that that hypocrisy, I think, is really relevant and really alive for people.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, okay, well, we are saying that people should not be forcibly brought into a national um project that they themselves don't consent into.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like, of course, like this is in the context of the UN and uh uh uh you know developing and these norms around self-determination and democracy being promoted abroad, developing.

<v SPEAKER_00>At the same time, the United States of America is like, okay, but with Ethiopia, we're just gonna give Eritrea um uh over to the people.

<v SPEAKER_00>And it wasn't just like, okay, we're just like reunifying these people.

<v SPEAKER_00>It was like, it was a very like bloody and like devastating rain that took 30 years of civil war to finally reach the place we're at now, which is still not great, but now they're two separate countries.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, and so I think the the thing that's important here is that outside of just Eritrea in general, like there's a lot of um scholarship around the Cold War period and civil rights.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right.

<v SPEAKER_01>Wait, wait, wait.

<v SPEAKER_01>I because I want to distinguish the civil rights.

<v SPEAKER_01>To me, what was like most significant about the Ethiopia Eritrea saga there is that uh John Foster Dulles, who you attribute this to, you know, he felt initially it was like, oh, we have this, right, we have this like sharp trade-off between our ideals of self-determination and our like cynical interest in backing Ethiopia in its quest for an outlet to the sea.

<v SPEAKER_01>But like actually the effort to try to be cynical just backfired.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like Ethiopia went communist.

<v SPEAKER_01>Then the Eritrean like rebel movement that eventually won that war, they were like also leftists because they didn't like America.

<v SPEAKER_01>And also now, like 30 years after the 30 years of fighting about that, the whole situation continues to be like very fraught.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, there's Somaliland separatists, there were like I don't blame everything on this one.

<v SPEAKER_00>No, no, no, no.

<v SPEAKER_01>I'm not saying that like I blame everything on it either.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's just that like basically the effort by the United States of America to like micromanage events in the Horn of Africa like didn't work.

<v SPEAKER_01>But I think the like the lesson, the lesson to me, the lesson to learn from this isn't about like ideals or whether we're living up to the ideals or whatever.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's that there should be much more humility about the American government's ability to deliver outcomes in very distant parts of the world that involve cultures that we don't have a ton of familiarity with, where the American decision makers are tending to get manipulated by these actors who have their own right, like this was a classic Cold War thing.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's like some guy who's got a militia will be like, we're for capitalism.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, and then like Ronald Reagan is saying that Yonas Savimbi is like the George Washington of Angola.

<v SPEAKER_01>And like, you know, it's it's like we're the superpower in this, but like we're also like the naive dupes.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think the thing that's important here is that I I agree that like the biggest lesson you could have ever about meddling in foreign policy is like you should have tons of humility, massive uncertainty bans about quite literally almost everything that you're doing.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, and it's like long-term impact on the development of the nations we're trying to make better or whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>And but I think that the thing that's important here is that like while I agree that self-interest is an incredibly important tool for figuring out what to do, sometimes it's actually difficult to know what's in your self-interest in different cases.

<v SPEAKER_00>And the idea that like hands off is itself a like neutral decision, I think is like both it's wrong.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like there are costs to not acting, and there is just as there are costs to acting.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think there's like a weird sense that like non-intervention is like, and by that I mean not just military invention, but like non-intervention at all in these cases, whether it's diplomatically, whether it's institutional building, whether it's, you know, aid or whatever you're doing, like that not doing it is somehow just the neutral choice.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think is like a a conceptually confused like framework.

<v SPEAKER_00>But on top of that, too, that the values actually align with self-interest.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like being a small L liberal is largely believing that like things like democratization, things like free speech, things like free enterprise, things like free trade, like that these sorts of things end up on average, by a large amount, correlating with the self-interest of all nations.

<v SPEAKER_00>Because less uh having stability in large parts of the world is beneficial because you don't foster terrorist cells, you don't see war, you don't see you don't see mass migration to your country.

<v SPEAKER_00>But on like all of these things, and again, that is like these are principles.

<v SPEAKER_00>They don't actually tell you exactly what to do in every specific place.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I do think that like this framework is really important because it's not easy to distinguish, okay, I always know it's in our self-interest, and then there are these ideals that are like, no, these things are correlated and they help you make decisions.

<v SPEAKER_01>Well, okay, so I mean, I think we are both believers in like the positive sum world, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>And I think that's that's important, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>That this is something that's well, lots of people don't believe in positive sum outcomes.

<v SPEAKER_01>Uh, this has come increasingly under pressure in the universe.

<v SPEAKER_01>And so I I agree that like in that sense, like some of these tensions kind of relax, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>That like I don't know what the United States of America should do to have Mexico not be controlled by violent drug cartels.

<v SPEAKER_01>But like if you could make that happen, that would be good for America.

<v SPEAKER_01>It would mostly be good for Mexico, but it would also be good for America.

<v SPEAKER_01>Some of that is because Mexico is right next door.

<v SPEAKER_01>But even if it's a further away country, like a better is better, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>If somebody in Singapore invents a cure for skin cancer, like that's good.

<v SPEAKER_01>And so if there's better schools everywhere, if there's better public health outcomes everywhere, that has like the prospect of better things happening for us.

<v SPEAKER_01>So like that's great.

<v SPEAKER_01>But I don't I don't feel like the practical function of idealism in American foreign policy has really been to do that.

<v SPEAKER_01>And that's not just like on the hypocrisy level, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>It's that like the effort to push America to like do more, to be more engaged, to be more idealistic, has like largely consisted of sort of ham-fisted militaristic.

<v SPEAKER_01>But let's be comparative here, Matt.

<v SPEAKER_00>Because like, I mean, people say this stuff and it's like obviously true.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like we could we could just like we have an entire podcast where me and you just like list times where the US or the West tried to intervene for like positive reasons and it went very, very badly.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like I could also spend an entire podcast listing times where the West didn't intervene and things went very, very badly.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like our choice not to intervene in Rwanda did not like lead to like mass prosperity and like long-term stability for the region.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like these are things that I agree, there are uncertainty bands in both directions.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I think that like it is correct that you should have like a very, very high bar for doing military intervention because like if you're like actively choosing to like bomb places or whatever, you know you're gonna be causing some sort of chaos from that.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like I think that this is why the debate gets very weird.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, it to me, like liberal internationalism was not just we should just like bomb bad guys.

<v SPEAKER_00>It was like the belief that you know the international environment can be shaped by institutions, norms, and cooperation, and that it's worth doing that.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like there are many versions of this which have become like near uncontroversial to like the wonky set, like things like PEPFAR, um, things like giving people training for security um uh uh for like their police officers or whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's like these things have become like normalized in an international context.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like Kenya is like currently like in Haiti, like doing trainings because the Haitian government invited them in to help train their police officers.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like this happened in um Sierra Leone with the British.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, like over and over, you see these like liberal international institutions having developed things that people would have said, I mean, that's that's intervention.

<v SPEAKER_00>These are interventions.

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean is this like I I mean, you you mentioned, you know, I I don't want to, you know, break break the fourth wall, but you you mentioned this Kenyans in Haiti thing.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah, and to me offline.

<v SPEAKER_01>So I was looking into it, and it it's like this doesn't seem like a big success story to me, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like this is a this is like a follow-on to an earlier Brazilian-led effort to do the same thing that like ended in like horrifying they like imported cholera into the country.

<v SPEAKER_01>There was like all this sex trafficking that was happening.

<v SPEAKER_01>So that mission got scrapped, and then things got like terrible again.

<v SPEAKER_01>And so there was this idea of a new mission that was going to be led by Kenyan personnel, which seems strange.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Uh, Kenya's uh very far away.

<v SPEAKER_01>I was like, maybe there's a French-speaking African country, but Kenya was trying to develop this security relationship with the United States.

<v SPEAKER_01>With the United States.

<v SPEAKER_01>Kenya achieved, under the Biden administration, major non-NATO ally status, which means um they can like buy better uh military equipment.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um I don't totally understand why the Biden administration wanted to do this.

<v SPEAKER_01>I don't totally understand why the Kenyan government wanted to do it.

<v SPEAKER_01>But part of the package deal was that Kenya was going to get basically the US and Canada to pay for them to do this deployment in Haiti, which they feel will be like a training exercise for their army.

<v SPEAKER_01>But like no one can actually get the American Congress to pony up the money for this.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, Canada has put a decent chunk of change into it relative to their size.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, all of Port-au-Prince is like still run by these gangs that are here.

<v SPEAKER_01>And there seems to be a kind of a just like a like a like a circular discussion where people are like, maybe we should invest a lot of money in this mission with high ideals, but then nobody actually wants to.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I mean, even in your framing of that, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like the pro I mean, yes, the Kenyan situation, I'm not bringing up as like a this has been a great gold star for liberal internationalism.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think like the failures of it, I think, are actually quite instructive.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, this is a situation where the Kenyan prime minister, I'm sorry, the um the uh uh Haitian prime minister asked for military, international military assistance.

<v SPEAKER_00>It was like a request from the from the UN, please come help us.

<v SPEAKER_00>The US says, recognizing our our history of colonial um ex uh adventures in the region, we don't think it's a good idea for us to be the ones doing this.

<v SPEAKER_00>And Kenya ends up volunteering, as you mentioned, for this, you know, because they have other other desires.

<v SPEAKER_00>And then like the US doesn't actually pony up the money to do it.

<v SPEAKER_00>The other countries that said they were gonna commit some of their troops to also help out don't do it.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like, yeah, like it failed because people like didn't do the project.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like if someone came to you, Matt, and was like, hey, like, you know, like we uh uh wanted to pass this uh uh you know inclusionary upzoning measure, but then we like didn't fund it at all um and it didn't produce any like affordable housing, you'd be like, yeah, like duh, you didn't do it.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like fucking stupid.

<v SPEAKER_01>I don't know how deep into these housing analogies I want to get.

<v SPEAKER_01>But you know, I mean, we we see it with inclusionary zoning.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>A lot of cases where these things pass, and then what winds up happening is like less affordable housing than ever gets built.

<v SPEAKER_01>And then you always get the question like, was that an unintended conversation?

<v SPEAKER_00>But the hypocrisy works.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like this happened literally in Portland, where people were like, you guys said you wanted a bunch of affordable housing, you passed an owner's inclusionary zoning measure, it produced less housing than there was going on before.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so then they amended it.

<v SPEAKER_00>The Oregon state government has now passed a new law preempting Portland in the same hypocrisy like worked.

<v SPEAKER_01>Well, and I'm This really like I'm with you in general on hypocrisy, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, I think if I was to give a not foreign policy, but like a cosmic Trump take.

<v SPEAKER_01>I remember sometime in 2017, eight, whenever it was, I was like pushing a stroller.

<v SPEAKER_01>My son was younger in the past, um, going to I think Natural History Museum, which like took us past the Trump Hotel.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I saw some like goofy guys at MAGA hats, and I was like fired up back then.

<v SPEAKER_01>I was like, how can you support this, like, this corruption there?

<v SPEAKER_01>And he was like, Well, you know, you just asked these random people that?

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Oh, that's pretty cool.

<v SPEAKER_01>And he was telling me it's like, you know, they were all like that, all these politicians.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Trump, at least, you know, he's not trying to hide anything.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I was like, this is terrible.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, like sure.

<v SPEAKER_01>Every single person involved in American politics is on some level like self-interested in their behavior.

<v SPEAKER_01>They're not, you know, totally altruistic saints, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>But the fact that they are maintaining the idea that they are here to serve the public interest rather than to just enrich themselves is like a very constructive norm.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like it shapes actual behavior, it alters who goes into public service.

<v SPEAKER_01>And this idea that just like leveling down to like Trump is free of hypocrisy, like that, that's terrible.

<v SPEAKER_01>I think in the foreign policy context that you get unique problems where it's not a question of because I think the standard hypocrisy is like we're not living up to our ideals.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I think that was your civil rights point, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Which is that, you know, America wanted in the Cold War era to portray itself as leading the camp of freedom.

<v SPEAKER_01>And communists would make like good propaganda points about the racial situation in the United States.

<v SPEAKER_01>And that increased pressure on northern white liberals to be like, we should do something about this.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right?

<v SPEAKER_01>It's not just like it's like an international embarrassment.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right.

<v SPEAKER_01>And it's not just like, well, you know, because I think if you had asked northern white liberals in 1937, like, what's the up with Jim Crow, they'd be like, I'm against that.

<v SPEAKER_01>That's why we don't do it that way.

<v SPEAKER_01>But it's like, well, what are you doing about it?

<v SPEAKER_01>Nothing.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>And so you you ratchet it up.

<v SPEAKER_01>So you actually have to do something about it.

<v SPEAKER_01>In the international arena, I feel like what we get is more um bullshit, you know, not hypocrisy, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like in The Iraq War, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Where you have this just kind of like instrumentalization of idealistic concepts where it's not that like the Bush administration isn't like truly living up to America's high ideals.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's that they're not playing a real role in the decision making at all.

<v SPEAKER_01>And it's just this kind of um like diffuse, uh it just stops people from engaging in like real policy analysis and thinking about what's going on, thinking about costs and benefits, thinking about what it would mean to actually try to be helpful to foreigners, and like how limited our real desire to do that is.

<v SPEAKER_00>So I mean, I am not a uh as as an Eritrean, I'm not a Bush defender.

<v SPEAKER_01>Uh what did he do to Eritrea?

<v SPEAKER_00>I just in general, the uh the Iraq war uh and destabilizing the Middle East was something that most uh most of most of the region was was very against.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I I just think that like I think there are a couple things that I want to pull out there.

<v SPEAKER_00>One is that the point that you're making that you know that I made in my piece about the Cold War civil rights, which is the um, I believe Mary Dudziac uh book uh about that um phenomenon, is that the self-interest of the United States was aligned with the ideals, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like that was the part of the point, is that like it wasn't just like, oh, you need to be self-interested.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's that like part of being self-interested is holding up these norms whenever you can, particularly in the domestic context where you have tons of control.

<v SPEAKER_00>But just like in general.

<v SPEAKER_00>So like it was, hey, you are asking countries, especially in uh, you know, Africa, to align with you and not the USSR.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like at home, you're allowing people because of the color of their skin to be like, you know, beaten with uh, you know, you know, sprayed with fire hoses.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like that indicates that like, you know, your democracy, your capitalism, your freedom is is a complete farce.

<v SPEAKER_02>Right.

<v SPEAKER_00>That is like actually not is is helping you understand what your self-interest is.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like it is not just always perfectly knowable what there is to do.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so then in the foreign policy context, I'm not gonna defend like the Bush Mysteries, like, I I actually think that probably there were some people who actually did care about like democratization and the I think that there are some neocons who like clearly do give a shit about that sort of thing, even though I think that they're like wrong and like they they're dehumanizing to the populations.

<v SPEAKER_00>They don't really think about them as like full people who have like full politics, and otherwise they would understand the complexities of what they're doing when nation building.

<v SPEAKER_00>But putting that to the side, I just think that like I agree that people should be smarter and like use cost-benefit analysis and like think through the problems they're doing.

<v SPEAKER_00>And one way that I think it might be helpful to concretise what we're talking about, because we're at a level of like, I think, abstraction that's difficult to like figure out, is to like think through Sudan right now, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>So, like Sudan right now, very bad situation.

<v SPEAKER_00>Seems bad.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, you know, on one side you have uh the UAE is supporting one side of like a uh, you know, a brutal kind of civil conflict.

<v SPEAKER_00>On the other side, like Egypt is doing the same and funding them.

<v SPEAKER_00>And the UAA is like actively giving like weapons, and they say they're not, but it's like pretty clear that they're doing this.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's very, very bad.

<v SPEAKER_00>There's a lot of uh, you know, displacement going on.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's creating migration issues um in in Egypt, in Ethiopia, in South Sudan.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's like a powder keg that I think, you know, in five years we're all gonna be like, why is there a mass migration of like Sudanese people to like other parts of the world?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, why are we having the like because right now there's a huge problem and Sudan's a big country.

<v SPEAKER_00>I do not think that we should send like a military operation into Sudan to try to like beat the RAF or whatever it is.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think there are a lot of things you can do that like, I think, fall under intervention that we're just like not doing.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, first, I think that you could just like support like Chad, South Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia, and handling the refugee incoming so it doesn't destabilize all these countries.

<v SPEAKER_00>You could like even offer peacekeeping forces at the borders of these countries to make sure that there's not like spillover violence coming into them.

<v SPEAKER_00>You could create accountability mechanisms to make sure that if anything does happen, they're actually accounting for all the uh all the uh um atrocities are going on there so you can hold someone accountable in the long term, diplomatic infrastructure, immediate sea fire, all these things I think that largely you would be like you'd be in favor of some of these things.

<v SPEAKER_00>It depends on like the implementation or whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think that like it's actually quite difficult to motivate politicians, not just in the US, like around the world, to understand that these problems are theirs if there's no normative framework telling them that, like, hey, like the whole world living in a like a more democratic, more free state is actually just better for everyone.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like linking these things together is just really, really difficult to do in a pure self-interest because what we see right now is that when people who talk like you, I don't think this is your position, but like most people who talk about like self-interest are essentially just saying be isolationists.

<v SPEAKER_01>Well, I mean, yeah isolationist is a pejorative term.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um I agree.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right.

<v SPEAKER_01>But I mean, like, I don't think that if you look at the United States of America in the 1920s, in the era of like isolationism, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like the, you know, proponent, the people in the the Coolidge and Harding administrations, they were not saying that the United States should be like alone, like lurking in the corner, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like they believed in free trade very much.

<v SPEAKER_01>They believed in diplomacy, they had embassies and stuff around the world.

<v SPEAKER_01>They were skeptical of the idea that the United States should have military engagement far outside of our borders.

<v SPEAKER_01>As it happens, Adolf Hitler came to power, various other things happened that like came to discredit that approach.

<v SPEAKER_01>But I also think it's important to remember that like Hitler was not in power during the Coolidge and Harding administrations.

<v SPEAKER_01>Sure.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like it's an analysis of the situation that existed at the time that I think it's like wrong to like retroactively discredit.

<v SPEAKER_01>Trevor Burrus, Jr.

<v SPEAKER_00>But but Sudan, well would you think that those are wrong?

<v SPEAKER_00>That those those that those approaches would be incorrect, to lean on UAE to stop giving these weapons, to set up these like, you know, you know, uh infrastructure to help the uh absorb the refugees in countries.

<v SPEAKER_00>That'd be bad.

<v SPEAKER_01>Trevor Burrus, Jr.: If if the ambassador from the UAE asks my opinion, like I don't think that they should be funding the RSF.

<v SPEAKER_01>This seems like bad.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's morally wrong, it's unproductive, et cetera.

<v SPEAKER_01>I you know, I personally um give money to uh to give well um to their top charities fund, which tries to identify like the most cost-effective global public health charities.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um and they're quite cost-effective.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, they they think they save a life for about$5,000.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, they prevent some, you know, non-fatal illness and stuff.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I I I like that.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like I encourage other people to do this kind of thing.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um I support uh American foreign aid funding for global public health programs, which has sort of similar benefits.

<v SPEAKER_01>I'm struck that that's a hard sell.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, like most people, just like for people, like most people are like not that interested in giving money to highly effective global public health charities.

<v SPEAKER_01>Not just like the politics of foreign aid are tough, but like um Americans who give money to charity give very little of it to like effective global public health organizations.

<v SPEAKER_01>Very small amount of America's like before Trump started messing with foreign aid, the effective global public health stuff was a relatively small piece of the USAAD pie.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's actually grown as a share as a result of Trump cutting stuff.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I think that's like an interesting baseline about like what is people's like real level of interest.

<v SPEAKER_01>But do you think that that's good?

<v SPEAKER_01>I don't think it's good that people have so little interest in helping foreigners, but I think it's indicative that like the overwhelming preponderance of like this like talk is quite vacuous and like deeply misguided, not just hypocritical.

<v SPEAKER_01>What do I mean?

<v SPEAKER_00>What do you mean that's what what talk is deeply misguided?

<v SPEAKER_01>That like, you know, I I remember back in what is 2011 or something.

<v SPEAKER_01>I was alright, like I was give well head.

<v SPEAKER_01>I was like, you know, like we gotta help people uh with malaria.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like people who live in Africa are human beings and their lives count.

<v SPEAKER_01>And you're just getting like no traction.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like fucking nobody cared about this.

<v SPEAKER_01>And then suddenly there was like a rebellion in Libya, and it appeared that the Libyan government might crush the rebellion in Libya.

<v SPEAKER_01>And the idea that like this was really bad, that like people in Africa might die as a result of Gaddafi crushing this rebellion became like a media obsession.

<v SPEAKER_01>There were New York Times op-eds about it.

<v SPEAKER_01>There wound up being a NATO bombing campaign that helped the rebels successfully overthrow the Libyan government, which then led to like subsequent rounds of civil war.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like it's not super clear how helpful that was.

<v SPEAKER_01>It cost billions of dollars.

<v SPEAKER_01>And like the whole time, nobody was saying like maybe we should uh try to develop a malaria vaccine.

<v SPEAKER_00>So, I mean, I I think um I agree with you as someone who also gives to give well and give directly and has uh not not as long as you, but I didn't have any disposable income in time.

<v SPEAKER_02>Well, you're young.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_00>Uh but uh, you know, I agree with you that like it is it is frustrating that more people don't care about like giving to those things, but like you are fundamentally making, I think, a media critique in this situation.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, yes, I think it is bad that the media, and by that I also mean the demand from the American people for what to for what to care about, is often limited to specific flashpoints in which uh often there are like refugee groups inside the United States that can like kind of spur more domestic political conversation around what's going on in their country of origin, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like I agree that like it it would be better if people were like, hey, like where are the people who are the most worse off in the world?

<v SPEAKER_00>And like, regardless of whether there's a refugee population here in the US, regardless of whether there's media attention here, like I, as someone who's working in the USAID, want to just go help that person out there.

<v SPEAKER_01>But I don't think it's quite that it's a refugee thing, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>I think it's that the United States has certain, you know, geopolitical bad guys.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right.

<v SPEAKER_01>Which is not the same as like foreign regimes that are bad.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, and this going all the way back to the clinics, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>There's there's like the rogue states, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>So North Korea, Iran, previously Iraq, Eritrea.

<v SPEAKER_01>At that time, Libya, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, you know, so like Gaddafi's Libya was like an official geopolitical bad guy.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>And so then when the prospect comes of overthrowing a bad guy regime comes into play, you suddenly get this like very moralized discourse where there's no effort to like apply that in any kind of, you know, to either do like cost-benefit, like what are the benefits of overthrowing the Libyan regime versus malaria bed nets, but also like what is the actual badness of the Libyan regime versus many other bad regimes.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I again, like I think that like there has to be a distinction here between like what we're trying to get to and like failures of implementation, and also just people being dumb.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like these are like three separate things going on.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like there are the failures of implementation, which is that like people incorrectly being able to adjudicate what is actually a threat to the United States.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like these are often failures because of, you know, people don't understand much about other countries.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like there's something that happens in the media that spurs everyone's attention because maybe there's a famine or there's something horrible that's going on that like spurs people to care about it.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so people stop thinking about stuff in a in a more you know cost-benefit analysis way.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think that like, to me, the question is in what direction do we want the government of the world to be moving?

<v SPEAKER_00>Ones particularly in the West or the ones that have, you know, the kind of money and institutional capacity to build up institutional capacity in other countries.

<v SPEAKER_00>Because like, I think that as you and I do, we take very seriously like the economic consensus around why it is that certain nations haven't developed as being largely a function of their institutions.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like it's a very unsatisfying answer for a lot of people because what it indicates is like, I mean, like the Ashamoglu and Robinson thesis is largely that there are like these critical junctures in time, at which point, you know, because of some contingent political fight or something that goes on, um, a country develops extractive or inclusive institutions.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like those are things like property rights, rule of law, democra democratic institutions, whatever it is.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, and like I don't think that you can like control like a puppet master whether a country does that, but I think you can learn from history that there are ways that you can set up the international order to make it more or less likely that people develop those when those critical junctures arrive.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think the best example of this actually is like the EU succession process, in which it was, you know, it basically predicated if you want to enter the EU, you're going to to the Eastern European countries in particular, you're gonna have to do a bunch of these kind of like democratizing, like liberalizing uh reforms internally in order to get access.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like that worked.

<v SPEAKER_00>You literally saw, I mean, it worked for uh um Poland, the Czech Republic.

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, yes, I mean, Poland has had a lot of economic success.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yes.

<v SPEAKER_01>That is definitely true.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I mean, I think that like, again, these are not such there's just like in I think there's like a weirdly asymmetric um expectation of success in foreign policy because people have the sense that non-intervention is somehow, I've said this before, but like is like the neutral choice.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like it's not like non-intervention also leads to all the problems you're talking about.

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, like I mean, I so I I I agree with like the formalistic point, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>That it's like you're you're you're always doing something.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yes.

<v SPEAKER_01>But again, like what I'm trying to push in all of this is just that sort of desaturating the debate, trying to de demoral make the debate less moralistic, concentrate more on what it is we think national interests really are.

<v SPEAKER_01>In this case, I in the foreign policy case, I think will lead to clearer decision making.

<v SPEAKER_01>That it's not like one of these things where setting our aspirations higher will get us to a better place.

<v SPEAKER_01>Part of the reason is because like I agree with you, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like there's a version of Trump, right, who's like, well, what we're gonna do is like steal Venezuela's oil, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>And in a funny way, I think there's like a horseshoe between like post-colonial leftists and Trumpism, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Where it's like on the left, it's like the West got rich by plundering the developing world, and that's bad.

<v SPEAKER_01>And Trump is like, the West gets rich by plundering the world's natural resources, so we should do that.

<v SPEAKER_01>And then, you know, there's like a nice like liberal sanity where it's like, that's actually not true.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like the West did some plundering, but like got rich mostly by having functional institutions.

<v SPEAKER_01>And, you know, the the risk with the Venezuela operation to me is that of like the United States Venezuelifying itself through all these like shady Trumpian.

<v SPEAKER_00>You know, I think in actuality, meaning you are not that far apart.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think the thing that's actually different is where we think the important intervention, the debate is right now.

<v SPEAKER_00>My fear is that we are entering a like state of consensus in the post-Iraq war moment where basically people are like, it is irrelevant to the United States, what goes on in the rest of the world.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like that, like But who is saying that?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like it's really hard because most people don't talk about foreign policy in a very like granular way.

<v SPEAKER_00>But my like sense from when I like am uh talking to people in Washington, D.C.

<v SPEAKER_00>about foreign policy is that like from liberal internationalism is not in vogue anymore, that people are like, we shouldn't be engaging in these conflicts abroad.

<v SPEAKER_00>We shouldn't, it's not like our our place to engage in these sorts of things.

<v SPEAKER_00>We should basically stay out of it.

<v SPEAKER_00>We shouldn't give money uh uh abroad, we shouldn't do this sort of thing.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like on the right, they're like, yeah, like we should slash the foreign aid budget.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like we should America has no obligation to anyone else inside the entire world.

<v SPEAKER_00>On the left, it's not like that.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think it's more that they view the American intervention as always per se evil, that there's like no way to make this better, that like they want to basically blanket prevent the US from being able to engage in these sorts of um conflicts that could be in any way considered military intervention.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like to me, I'm like, I just very much worry that where we're headed is like a a like hands-off approach to the world, and not in like a real way.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, obviously, we have like economic interests that will always keep us like engaged in certain respects, but like in the sense of is it any better.

<v SPEAKER_01>We're very engaged right now, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>There's like an actual war happening.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I mean, I think this is like my point is like this is like kind of like the like logical extension of saying it's not your problem.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like the harms of what is gonna happen in Iran or what's gonna happen in Venezuela um as fallout for what the Trump administration does is like not relevant to his right-wing supporters.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like they don't like that's not uh like compelling to them at all, like that it would matter that you know you've bombed Tehran and now there are like people there who like were going to work and can't like go.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like this is just like not important in the conversation in a way that like under the Bush administration, that was bad for right wing.

<v SPEAKER_00>Great rings were not like we're happy about these like images of like us having hurt like young women who we're supposed to be rescuing from the Taliban.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like that, like that was that was bad.

<v SPEAKER_01>Sure, but they were but they but it was just um Well, we're probably not gonna solve uh the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in this conversation.

<v SPEAKER_01>But to me, again, that was like a very recent example of something that was getting a lot of attention in the United States, different kinds of attention, people have a lot of different viewpoints on that issue, obviously.

<v SPEAKER_01>The viewpoint of like we should try to understand what concretely are America's interests in this and like roll back anything that we are doing that does not specifically relate to those interests.

<v SPEAKER_01>That seemed to me to be the least common perspective on the whole thing.

<v SPEAKER_01>That like what happened is that once something gets into like most Americans most of the time pay almost no attention to almost any country in the world.

<v SPEAKER_01>And then specific things get onto the radar for various reasons, you know, mediogenic reasons, and they become these political controversies.

<v SPEAKER_01>And then people start having these like very moralistic disagreements about like the current thing.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>While continuing to be completely blind to everything in the world.

<v SPEAKER_00>Everything in politics.

<v SPEAKER_00>This happened like with the fucking like uh, you know, Medicare for All, all of a sudden, all these people who called you like an evil shill for like for like not being for Medicare for All are all of a sudden okay with the public option.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, yes, this happens in every single political dispute ever.

<v SPEAKER_00>Is that you are an evil person if you don't agree with people when it's not a good idea?

<v SPEAKER_00>No, no, no, no.

<v SPEAKER_01>But like with the Medicare for All dispute, though, like we're all agreeing, more or less, that like what we are trying to do is make like better health and economic policy for the United States of America.

<v SPEAKER_01>Okay.

<v SPEAKER_01>And then even so, like politics is really hard.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like democratic politics is really, really challenging.

<v SPEAKER_01>I think in the foreign domain, right, in a certain, like actually profound philosophical sense, like a democratic government is supposed to be trying to reach decisions.

<v SPEAKER_00>I agree, but now you're you're too I think you're also too America-centric about this.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, I think the best version America-centric.

<v SPEAKER_00>No, but about this like conversation, like the best version of everything that I've been talking about, and ones that I think that even you'd support, like things like whether it's the British intervention in Sierra Leone or whatever it is, like these are multilateral.

<v SPEAKER_01>Wait, explain to me what happened in Sierra Leone.

<v SPEAKER_00>There was in the like early 2000s, 2000s, uh, there's, you know, Charles Taylor in Liberia is, you know, a bloody dictator and is spreading a bunch of um discord in in Sierra Leone.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um and so then uh the UN peacekeeping operation there looks like it's gonna fail.

<v SPEAKER_00>Britain, with just, I mean, like very few troops, I think, in like the single thousands, um, decides to, I mean, the current story is like Britain just parachuted in and like was able to, you know, solve everything, but it took a couple years.

<v SPEAKER_00>And essentially what they do is they provide basic training to the Sierra Leone army and instill a professional military culture where they kind of break the ties between the military/slash police forces and like the politicians to create more of that kind of professionalized sense of what cops are supposed to be.

<v SPEAKER_00>In addition, the Britain kind of lobbies the UN Security Council to sanction blood diamonds, they boost the UN peacekeeping forces to roughly 17,000.

<v SPEAKER_00>Eventually, they successfully remove like 42,000 weapons, and like Tony Blair is more popular in Sierra Leone than he was in like Britain.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like it's like it is like it is one of the like one of the classic success stories, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>And I don't want to overlearn from this, but I'm just saying like this was like a multilateral operation in which people were like, we have a very concrete goal.

<v SPEAKER_00>We're gonna like try and do something very specific.

<v SPEAKER_00>We're not trying to like nation build or whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like, and these are like nor like and again, like it conforms to kind of like the norm situation here, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like what they're or the institution thing that I was talking about earlier, which is that like, okay, we recognize that there are these specific institutions that are really important to be built up and to be strong.

<v SPEAKER_00>How do we just like aid them in doing that?

<v SPEAKER_00>And again, like PEPFAR is an example of this that doesn't really include the military that much, but like we literally do build up the public health institutions of these countries.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like it's not just giving them money, like that's all that's going on with PEPFAR.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, that's part of the success, is that we are creating this infrastructure.

<v SPEAKER_00>There's a lot of controversy over this.

<v SPEAKER_01>Of course, I'm not saying there's not, but if we were to say like net, net, yeah, like Tony Blair's taste for international ideal, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, but no, no, but this is my point.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, yes, like most things most people do are bad and dumb.

<v SPEAKER_00>In foreign policy, it's even harder because there's wider uncertainty bands, and the fact that there's military engagement always makes the stakes higher.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, I agree with you on all this stuff, but I think there's like a sense of naivety right now on the group of people who like think that there's like not the same level of uncertainty bands and harm that can come to American self-interest about this.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like your perspective that, like, yes, it would be better if America specifically thought about American self-interest.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, I think sure, directionally, that seems like a good thing to happen just because people should be clear-sighted about what they're doing.

<v SPEAKER_00>But from an international perspective, and from like what I want all countries and all people to be doing, I think everyone directionally needs to move towards we are live in an interconnected society where pandemics rage because you don't actually have institutionals, like public health institutions in certain countries, where refugee crises will come and like cause problems in your country because there will be wars in other places.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, people need to understand that what happens in other places is important and that the only thing We know is that shoring up the institutions of other places is the only way to lead to long-term development.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so, like, if we're not going to be creative and think hard about ways to be better and better at this, then we're just like resigning ourselves to a world where there are just like billions and billions of people like living in like poverty and causing problems, notably for us back home.

<v SPEAKER_00>Okay, but I mean That's my point.

<v SPEAKER_01>If we if we look at like poverty reduction in the world over the past 50 years, happens under the reign of liberal internationalism.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yes, but very the the lion's share of it did not happen in countries that Western powers were exerting a lot of influence over.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like some of this, it's hard to say because you know, you China and India have so many more people than any other countries.

<v SPEAKER_00>But also just like China and India don't have like a history of Western intervention.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, I don't know.

<v SPEAKER_01>Well, it's not that they don't have a history of Western intervention, it's that the relevant economic reforms were not the outputs of Western intervention.

<v SPEAKER_00>I'm not saying that they're out, but I'm just saying that like the problem here, again, is that like it is not like domestic policy where it's much easier to isolate what actually happened in specific cases, but like the idea that what was going on internationally in terms of the economic order that the West was pushing up, propping up, the development um uh policies that it was like pushing in in the international realm, like these were like irrelevant to development of these Asians seems like not true to me.

<v SPEAKER_01>Well, I'm not saying that, but I'm just saying like I mean, I guess I did not have a really sharp disagreement with your summary there.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>To me, the perspective that you outlined to me just seems at odds with the idea that like what we want to do is bring back the idealistic hubris of the Clinton and Bush years.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like the things that you want to see happen seem to me to be so much more modest than the things that like actually get done when people sort of get fired up about, you know, we're gonna change the world and we're gonna, we're gonna like make everything better, versus just like trying to be more chill, trying to be thoughtful about what actually helps.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like this pandemic thing, which I completely agree with, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like it's an interconnected disease landscape.

<v SPEAKER_01>But that just like somehow never got any traction with, you know, like we're making the world safe for democracy, whatever it is like that.

<v SPEAKER_00>Well, and and not any tra I mean, like the the Clinton network like you are you are you are really pessimistic on the fact that like there's been a lot of money and effort spent, not enough.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like a lot of people were convinced by these arguments to go do things.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's not that it has to be it's that the amount of money that has been spent on that kind of thing is very small compared to the amount of money that was spent on things that were said to have these incredibly Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so we live in a fallen world, Matt.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's okay.

<v unknown>Okay.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um Should we leave it at the front when we're Well, I mean, the I want to just clarify here that like my argument isn't that we should go back to the pre-Trump liberal order.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's that like there's a huge space between Iraq-style regime change and total abandonment of liberal internationalism.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I wish that like people were more positive about the capacity of the United States, about the West, about multilateral national international institutions to like do good things in the world instead of just on the right, obviously tearing them down with every chance they get, um, especially the post-liberal right, but also on the left, kind of like viewing these things as like rooted in evil and colonial.

<v SPEAKER_01>Okay, so let me let me put an idea out here for you.

<v SPEAKER_01>Because you've talked about liberal international, you know, is a word we could debate uh for a long time.

<v SPEAKER_01>To me, a principle of um caring about like foreign governments both pushes like for more engagement and and for less in certain things.

<v SPEAKER_01>So, like to me, it's important in the Haiti case that the Haitian government was asking for help.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I don't think that we should say yes to every request that we receive from foreign governments for help, but I do think that we should take that seriously.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like to me, yeah, something I feel like like left-wing people who I strongly agree with about like Iran, I I like really disagree with them about aspects of policy toward Ukraine because it seems to me that like they are not taking seriously the fact that like Ukraine is a real state that is asking for help against a Russian intervention.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's not really our intervention in that sense.

<v SPEAKER_01>I feel to me, when people say like intervention and like liberal intervention and talk about how things were before Trump, what comes to my mind is Anne-Marie Slaughter, responsibility to protect type stuff, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>This idea that the United States should be more willing to violate the sovereignty of other states in the names of advancing human rights.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I'm very I'm much more skeptical of that.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_00>I have a hard time with this because I agree with you that like these values are intention, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like if you're like, I want to help like a group of women that's going to be attacked and assaulted, but it's happening within a country that is not asking for our help, has like, you know, some, you know, control, like legitimate control over the boundaries of the other.

<v SPEAKER_01>Of course, there's lots of bad regions.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah, there are bad regions that have like some political legitimacy in their own countries, nevertheless.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so it's really hard to say what we we mean directionally here because we intervene so little in like humanitarian things here.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like I think that we should do everything we can short of violating someone's sovereignty in helping people.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, and until we've done that, it's a little bit weird to bring up the military.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, are we giving refugee visas to any woman who can get out of one of you know, of the Taliban's control?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, are we providing monetary support to people who are in these situations so they can help themselves?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like now we have the ability to, even if you are in like a repressive regime, get you micropayments or get you educational um opportunities on the internet or whatever it is.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, I think that to me, like this impulse that we are responsible for other people as well, even if they are not formed within our borders, is correct.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think the idea that the first tool you reach for is like the military is like crazy.

<v SPEAKER_00>So, like that's my perspective.

<v SPEAKER_00>Again, like it's very difficult to talk about this in like a generality.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, I think there's probably there's some cases, edge cases, where I would support military invention where like you wouldn't.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like, that's not really a live.

<v SPEAKER_00>I don't know if there's like one right now where like I can even like think of that.

<v SPEAKER_02>All right.

<v SPEAKER_00>Time for time for peer review.

<v SPEAKER_00>Peer review.

<v SPEAKER_00>Let's do it.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um actually pretty sure that I'm in our peer review today.

<v SPEAKER_00>This is like a first time for me coming across a paper where I'm like, I think that I'm in the in the in the data.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, so what's it about?

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_00>So this is about grade inflation.

<v SPEAKER_00>So essentially, this paper uses um administrative data from the LAUSD from 204 2004 to 2013 and all Maryland public high schools from 2013 to 2023.

<v SPEAKER_00>So I just snuck in there.

<v SPEAKER_02>Okay.

<v SPEAKER_00>And uh what they're looking for is what the impact of grade inflation is going to be um on people's long-term benefits.

<v SPEAKER_00>And they've distinguished between two types of grade inflation, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>So there's mean grade inflation.

<v SPEAKER_00>So teachers who give everyone higher grades in their actual performance warrants.

<v SPEAKER_01>At first I thought this was gonna be like like mean grade inflation, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like this like nice grade inflation or mean grain.

<v SPEAKER_00>No, mean as an average.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um and so they find that one standard deviation higher mean grade inflation from a teacher reduces future test scores, reduces the five-year high school graduation rate, reduces college enrollment, reduces employment, and reduces earnings.

<v SPEAKER_00>The cumulative damage, one teacher with one standard deviation higher mean grade inflation reduces the present discounted value of their students' lifetime earnings by about$200,000 per year of teaching.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's like crazy.

<v SPEAKER_00>The thing that's interesting is that passing grade inflation is very different.

<v SPEAKER_00>So, like teachers who are more likely to bump students from an F to a D, that's like basically just good.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like at worst, neutral, but like it seemed just good.

<v SPEAKER_00>It reduces grade retention a little bit, um, but it increases high school graduation, has limited long-term effects.

<v SPEAKER_00>There's some evidence it nudges students towards community college enrollment and slightly boosts earnings, but um, these effects fade.

<v SPEAKER_00>But anyway, I thought that was interesting because we talk about, I usually think about grade inflation as all just like one bucket.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah, I mean, so uh one thing that that made me think of is, you know, I think uh you mostly hear about grade inflation, I mostly hear about grade inflation at the college university level.

<v SPEAKER_01>And people disagree about this, but it seems like a lot of the origin originally of college-level grade inflation was in the Vietnam War era that professors were trying to avoid failing students because if they got kicked out of school, they'd get drafted, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>And so that's like a clear-cut case of like it's probably not like good for the country, but like you're obviously benefiting a student by not like flunking them into conscription, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>And so you see a similar impulse in the high school, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>That like actually, if somebody is like actually not doing like acceptable work, um, obscuring that information from them, it seems like can keep them motivated and like keep them from dropping out of school and can can benefit them.

<v SPEAKER_01>But it's probably hard in practice to like just keep people out of failing without ending up like doing overall good.

<v SPEAKER_00>Just because you think it like uh it shifts the norms.

<v SPEAKER_00>You're like, well, okay, if I'm helping him, I can help him get like a C do a- Well, it's like you're pulling on the whole string, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Because you're you're trying to maintain some uh differentiation between like you know, like the really bad student and the somewhat better student.

<v SPEAKER_01>So you lift him up, but it like compresses you, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>And you you end up doing it.

<v SPEAKER_00>I guess it depends how many students you have on the cost of getting an F.

<v SPEAKER_01>Well, I think it but I mean, I think it's like, you know, you're not just thinking about like one teacher one year, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like you're thinking about how like norms and practices shift over time.

<v SPEAKER_01>At any rate, like the fact that grade inflation on average is like really harmful.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, it's like it's I think like one of the I love these research findings that are like they're intuitive, but they're counterintuitive.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, because it's like, I'm sure the teachers think that they're being nicer.

<v SPEAKER_01>Certainly, if they graded more harshly, students and their parents would be mad, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Because they'd be like, well, it'd be better for me as an individual if you gave me a higher grade, like which is probably true.

<v SPEAKER_01>But it's like really bad on average.

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, like the paper to not give students real feedback about the quality of their work.

<v SPEAKER_00>The paper finds that you're correct about this, by the way, that like that the teachers who pass more students also tend to inflate grades generally.

<v SPEAKER_00>They're correlated at 0.86 in LA, but only 0.36 in Maryland, where it's uh, you know, Maryland public high schools are pretty good and there's a um failing is rarer.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, I mean, I feel like the like entire grade inflation public discourse is largely focused on higher education um in a way that like really aligns and this like begins much earlier in people's careers.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like what you see in this, like the mechanism that's going on here is that like students try less hard if it's easier to just get a passing grade, a B, an A without having to try very hard.

<v SPEAKER_00>So like you are training young people not to work hard in school and they get to college and they don't have an experience of working hard.

<v SPEAKER_00>So either they're like really, really in like the top 10% of like effort maxing and they like learn to work hard, or they like complain because they're being asked to do something that's like quite difficult.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like I think there's like a lot of like condescension towards these students, and like I feel like it's like we should have some like, I mean, I think it's good to have like public like pull yourself up a little bit and work harder, kind of language and moralizing towards people sometimes.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like at the same time, like these institutional structures are like their incentives.

<v SPEAKER_00>These are children, and you are teaching them what it means succeed in the world and where you should put effort.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like the great thing about humans is that like we tend to conserve energy and effort unless we are forced to for like evolutionary reasons.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so, like, I I do feel like there's like the solutions here have all been kind of weird and unlikely to really work.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, right now we have Harvard suggesting they're gonna like just like cap, I guess, certain um certain certain grade, uh, the amount of grades, uh, A grades that you can give in a class.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I'm like, I'm not really sure what this does downstream.

<v SPEAKER_00>This feels like we're just in this really bad equilibrium that just will continue on.

<v SPEAKER_01>I think there's like an interesting, seemingly authentic like mentality shift among America's teachers over a period of like several generations.

<v SPEAKER_01>Where like, you know, I think if you kind of teleported back in time to, you know, the early 1960s, people would have been like, yeah, obviously.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like kids want good grades, but like it's a false kindness, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>That like my job is to like kick these kids' asses a little bit so that they work hard and learn stuff, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>And that like the hard ass has just kind of disappeared over time.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, and you see like in movies, teen movies from the early 80s, these like legacy hard ass teachers, and they're kind of objects of mockery, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>That like we don't respect those people.

<v SPEAKER_01>And then there's this kind of newer core of like inspire them, kind, gentle, social and emotional learning, um, etc.

<v SPEAKER_01>etc.

<v SPEAKER_00>Do you think that that's a shift within teaching?

<v SPEAKER_00>I thought that was like mine, again, I'm not really deep in this.

<v SPEAKER_00>My understanding was that this was largely a reaction to a shift in demands from students and parents.

<v SPEAKER_00>That like the norm of asking your teacher to bump you up has gotten, I think, a lot more normal over the course of the decades, like even like making that request to someone, but then also just like teachers being held accountable by parents like every second on like these like apps that they're constantly having to do.

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, yes, I mean, I think I think it's like a little bit totalizing.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's like, you know, I mean, there's a the is a really good movie.

<v SPEAKER_01>I think uh The Holdovers about uh boarding school, you know, in the Vietnam War.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's a great plane movie era, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>But it's it's illustrating these sort of like parallel shifts in norms in the elite circles, where it's like, you know, there's a teacher there, he's an old-fashioned teacher, and he like wants to be a tough grader.

<v SPEAKER_01>And his view is that like the service that the parents are paying for at the elite boarding school is that like the teachers will kick the kids' asses because like parents want to be nice to their kids.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, I mean, I feel this as a parent dilemma all the time.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, you know that like kids will benefit from a certain amount of strictness, but that like you just like also want to have like a cuddly, fun relationship with your kids.

<v SPEAKER_01>And so there's like a logic to I am going to hire these other professionals to like make sure that the kid learns about you know Thucydides, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Only first and second generation immigrants are allowed to be teachers.

<v SPEAKER_00>That's how we solve this.

<v SPEAKER_01>Well, but yeah, as you see in the movie, the the parents are like defaulting on that deal.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>And like they just want their kids to get better grades, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>That's like the new sort of thing.

<v SPEAKER_01>And they and they and they link this, you know, in photographically, they show all of this school's uh alumni who fought in the world wars, and then they scroll to the Vietnam era and it's just one kid.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>And the kid is a scholarship student whose mom runs the cafeteria, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>And that's like the elite like defects from this norm first, yeah, and it's like rolled down.

<v SPEAKER_01>I'm struck by how differently we handle um youth sports in America, which is much more old-fashioned in that sense.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like it is widely understood that the only way for a kid to get better at soccer is to receive negative feedback on the quality of the soccer that they are playing currently.

<v SPEAKER_01>And that, like, if you're doing something wrong.

<v SPEAKER_00>I am not, I do not have children, and so I cannot speak to this.

<v SPEAKER_00>But my understanding is that like parents had gotten insane about coaches being mean to their kids.

<v SPEAKER_00>Isn't this is this not true or is it not maybe it depends on how good you're maybe?

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, there is push and pull on.

<v SPEAKER_01>Because of course, like you want your kid to get more playing time.

<v SPEAKER_01>You you want coaches to be nice to the kids, et cetera.

<v SPEAKER_01>But there is just like there is a level of seriousness of purpose, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Both in the like really cutthroat youth sports stuff that you hear, but like also just in relatively cuddly um like sports arenas because sports is inherently competitive, you know?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like you want to win.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um I guess it's you're really inherently.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, so is education.

<v SPEAKER_00>You could you want, don't you want to be the best?

<v SPEAKER_01>No, no, but like the team wants to win.

<v SPEAKER_00>But doesn't the school want to win?

<v SPEAKER_00>Don't they want to do that?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, what is it that the school is trying to win?

<v SPEAKER_01>Right.

<v SPEAKER_01>And it's like, I think that there is a lot of pressure.

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, I wrote about this recently, but like when in the No Child Left Behind Accountability era, uh, American education performance got quite a bit better.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, it got better at the high end, got better at the low end.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um and people really hated it.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like quite authentically.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like they didn't like how frequently their kids were getting tested.

<v SPEAKER_01>People whose schools were like below average didn't like to hear that fact.

<v SPEAKER_01>They like prefer.

<v SPEAKER_01>I like it's tough.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's like, you know, I mean Accountability is not pleasant.

<v SPEAKER_01>Half of kids are below average at reading, half of kids are below average at math, half of schools are below average at teaching, reading, and math.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, I don't know what to say.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, it's like it's tough out there.

<v SPEAKER_01>And but you can see it's like it's bad for kids' long-term performance to like not hear bad news about themselves.

<v SPEAKER_01>And we need to find a way to open our open our hearts to them.

<v SPEAKER_01>All right, I think that's a great place to end it.

<v SPEAKER_01>Thanks, Matt.

<v SPEAKER_01>Thank you.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, and you know, if you guys enjoyed this episode, please like, share, subscribe.

<v SPEAKER_01>Whatever platform you found this on uh is, I'm sure, a great one, and there has some way for you to convey how amazing we are.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, we'll be back next week with a fresh argument.