This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Michael J. Mazarr, author of the book Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America's Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy, which examines the decision to invade Iraq in March 2003. Mike is a senior political scientist at the Rand Corporation and a former professor at the National War College, and he warns of certain parallels between what happened 20 years ago and the growing sense of urgency and moral imperative to confront China that he now senses in Washington.
3:40 – Patterns that lead to poor decision-making in the realm of foreign policy and warfare
8:30 – Parallels between American discourse on Iraq and China
13:54 – American exceptionalism and the missionary mindset
15:51 – Much like the US experience after 9/11, could an equivalent “deeply felt imperative” trigger catastrophic conflict with China?
21:15 – The danger of moralistic thinking overriding rational cost-benefit analysis
27:37 – What does Washington hope to gain from the imputation of CCP illegitimacy?
31:47 – Debunking the claim that Washington exaggerates threats for the sake of increasing the defense budget
35:49 – The role of media and Congress in the lead-up to the Iraq war
40:49 – The difference between effective policymaking and policy negligence: assessing the Bush and Biden administrations
47:29 – Adapting the liberal “rules-based international order” to reflect contemporary realities
52:27 – The shortcomings of a reductionist “democracy vs. authoritarianism” foreign policy
A full transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.
Recommendations:
Mike: Mr. X and the Pacific by Paul Heer; The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment by Geoffrey Kabaservice
Kaiser: Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R.F. Kuang
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Curtain-raiser on the Shangri-La Dialogue, with the man who runs the show: James Crabtree of IISS
Harvard's William Kirby on China's higher education system and his book "Empires of Ideas"
Does the Capvision raid signal a crackdown on consultancies in China? The China Project's CEO Bob Guterma, formerly of Capvision, weighs in
China's draft regulations on generative AI, with Kendra Schaefer and Jeremy Daum
Xiong'an: Techno-natural utopia or authoritarian folly?
Earth Day episode: How can the U.S. and China cooperate on climate in this era of competition?
Legendary CNN reporter Mike Chinoy on his book and documentary series "Assignment China"
As the U.S. and China part ways, the Global South finds its own path, with Kishore Mahbubani
Sinica at the Association for Asian Studies Conference, Boston 2023: Capsule interviews
The Maoist legacy in Chinese private enterprise, with Chris Marquis
Beijing brokers a Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, with Tuvia Gering
The Xi-Putin meetings, with Maria Repnikova
The expansion of China's administrative state during COVID, with Yale Law's Taisu Zhang
Jude Blanchette on the Select Committee and the American moral panic over China
Inside Tencent's "Influence Empire," with Bloomberg's Lulu Chen
China and the electric vehicle battery supply chain, with Henry Sanderson
China and the Ukraine War one year after the invasion, with Evan Feigenbaum and Alexander Gabuev
Sinostan: Raffaello Pantucci on China's inadvertent empire in Central Asia
CSIS analyst Gerard DiPippo deflates the balloon hype and brings the discussion back to earth
Live in New York City with veteran China journalist Ian Johnson
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free