Stay ConnectedPower Problems is a bi-weekly podcast from the Cato Institute. Host John Glaser offers a skeptical take on U.S. foreign policy, and discusses today’s big questions in international security with distinguished guests from across the political spectrum. Podcast Hashtag: #FPPowerProblems.
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Copyright: © Cato Institute 2022
Alex Yu-Ting Lin, Assistant Director and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s International Security Center, explains how China’s concerns about status interact with smaller regional states and how that in turn helps shape the US-China rivalry. He examines how states use information warfare to delegitimize adversaries’ foreign policies and applies his analysis to US-China relations. He also discusses Euro-centric bias in international relations studies, China’s approach to flashpoints like the South China Sea and Taiwan, and whether China should be considered “revisionist,” among other topics.
Show Notes
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Dov Levin, Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Hong Kong, examines the effects of whataboutism - essentially, charges of U.S. hypocrisy - on Americans’ foreign policy views. He explains his survey experiments to test the effectiveness of whatbaoutism on US public opinion and how it might shape policy. He also discusses his work on U.S. foreign election interference, the academic literature on hypocrisy costs, U.S. foreign policy activism, and avenues for future research on whataboutism.
Show Notes
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Peter Harris critiques America’s grand strategy of primacy and advocates for a move to restraint that necessarily includes wholesale reforms to domestic as well as foreign policy. He explains why primacy has persisted despite the wisdom of retrenchment and how decades of an expansive foreign policy has shaped American politics, culture, and institutions. He also discusses the problems of vested interests, partisanship, and how to make restraint more salable to the public.
Show Notes
Peter Harris, Why America Can’t Retrench (and How it Might), Polity Press, 2024.
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Daniel DePetris and Jennifer Kavanagh of Defense Priorities discuss the latest iteration of the Axis of Evil threat, this time in reference to China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, and argue their relationship is misconstrued and overhyped. They discuss threat inflation, the relationship dynamics among these four powers, including China and Russia’s relationship and how US posture has pushed them together, the state of the Russia-Ukraine war, China’s role in the Middle East, the problem of prioritizing threats and interests under primacy, and how to constructively think about core US national interests, among other issues.
Show Notes
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The Stimson Center’s Senior Fellow Dan Grazier and Research Associate Julia Gledhill analyze U.S. defense spending and explain how the Pentagon is creating “a budgetary time bomb set to explode in the next twenty years.” They discuss several examples of failed over-budget weapons acquisition programs and warn that future such fiascos are now in the making, with unsustainable budgetary implications, unless crucial reforms to U.S. defense and foreign policy are made.
Show Notes
Dan Grazier, Julia Gledhill, Geoff Wilson, “Current Defense Plans Require Unsustainable Future Spending”, Stimson Center Issue Brief, July 16, 2024.
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Renanah Joyce, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University, and Brian Blankenship, Assistant Professor at the University of Miami, explain how great power competition for foreign military bases in third-party host countries increases the costs of securing access. They discuss the strategy behind US forward basing over time, expansion into Africa in recent years, different ways of providing compensation to host countries, increasing competition for host country access, the lack of transparency on US overseas presence, and the strategic utility (or lack thereof) of overseas basing.
Show Notes:
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Charles Glaser, senior fellow at MIT’s Security Studies program and professor emeritus at George Washington University, discusses the dynamics of the security dilemma and international order. He explores how the security dilemma concept provides insights into America’s rivalry with its two great power rivals, Russia and China, and discusses U.S. policy with respect to the war in Ukraine, the dispute over Taiwan, U.S. interests vs commitments in East Asia, how to trim undesirable commitments, and why Washington’s flawed “liberal international order” concept leads to more conflictual foreign policies.
Show Notes
Charles L. Glaser, “Fear Factor,” Foreign Affairs, June 18, 2024
Charles L. Glaser, “Washington is Avoiding the Tough Questions on Taiwan and China,” Foreign Affairs, April 28, 2021
Charles L. Glaser “A Flawed Framework: Why the Liberal International Order Concept is Misguided,” International Security, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Spring 2019), pp. 51-87.
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Benjamin Friedman, policy director at Defense Priorities, argues that the United States should immediately begin withdrawing military forces from Europe to set the stage for European defense autonomy. He discusses the history of NATO, how it’s strategic purposes have evolved over time, what NATO costs America, defensibility problems with some Eastern European members, institutional inertia, differing threat assessments of Russia, and burden-sharing vs burden-dropping, among other topics.
Benjamin Friedman, "A New NATO Agenda: Less U.S., Less Dependency," Defense Priorities, July 8, 2024.
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Emma Ashford, senior fellow at the Stimson Center, discusses recent escalations in the Ukraine war, the costs to the United States and European partners of supporting Kyiv, the effect of the conflict on Russia’s economy, the problems with Biden’s strategy, why it’s unlikely Ukraine can achieve total victory, the timing of ceasefire diplomacy and peace talks, how early negotiations proved the significance of Ukraine’s neutrality as a core issue of the war, the wayward mission of NATO and the future of the alliance, and why it’s not in US interests to bring Ukraine into NATO, among other issues.
Show Notes
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Rachel Metz, assistant professor of political science at George Washington University, explains why security assistance, one of the most ubiquitous programs in U.S. foreign policy, so often fails. She argues that bureaucratic interests, organizational processes, and perverse dynamics of civil-military relations discourage conditioning U.S. support for partner militaries. She also discusses the role of norms in the U.S. Army, the need for greater civilian oversight and management, why the policymakers need to be more selective about security assistance, and how U.S. political leaders have expanded the military’s roles and responsibilities to the detriment of an effective U.S. strategy.
Show Notes
Rachel Tecott Metz; “The Cult of the Persuasive: Why U.S. Security Assistance Fails,” International Security 2022/2023; 47 (3): 95–135.
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