Selling Power, Not Buying Safety: America's Foreign Policy Vibe

Why was Chamberlain's policy of appeasement towards Hitler a bad idea? If your response is a series of inchoate platitudes about how bad Hitler turned out to be, you have refused to learn the lessons history is trying to teach you. Hitler's expansionist ambitions were surely visible in 1936, as the German army invaded the Rhineland, violating the Treaty of Versailles. Then he annexed Austria in 1938. But you don't need the gift of hindsight to have strongly suspected that Chamberlain's idea of rewarding aggression with appeasement was going to end badly.

Chamberlain's actions, while misguided, largely reflected the prevailing public sentiment of his time. This episode highlights a recurring dilemma faced by open, democratic societies: how to effectively deter aggression from authoritarian regimes while remaining responsive to their citizenry. At its core, this challenge stems from a widespread misunderstanding of the fundamentally adversarial nature of international relations, especially when dealing with despotic governments. The public's reluctance to engage in conflict during the late 1930s is understandable, given the devastating toll of the First World War. However, while we can contextualize our current geopolitical timidity, we cannot justify it.

In adversarial relationships, each party has incentives to deceive for strategic advantage. Open, democratic societies are particularly vulnerable in this dynamic due to information asymmetry.

Claire Berlinski

explains in her piece on Iran:

Iran knows far more about us than we do about them. An open society is an open book. Ours is unusually open and unusually closed in the sense that flow of information between us and the world only goes in one direction. We pump out news of our culture, political life, strategic deliberations, war-making capacity, and morale by the metric tonne, and it quickly spreads to every corner of the globe, where our adversaries pore over it attentively. No comparable volume or quality of information about the world flows in to America, however.

This availability of information combined with the logic of election cycles make us far more readable to adversaries. The incentives facing decision makers are clearly visible to adversaries, since decision makers in democracies are beholden to voters; and open societies have entire industries dedicated to studying voter preferences and constraints. Predicting China’s or Iran’s behavior necessarily entails obtaining access to the inner workings of the CCP or the IRGC, institutions which ‘manage’ their domestic press, and to which access is closely monitored and controlled. Gauging public sentiment alone, which itself is complicated by preference falsification, won’t get you very far in analyzing these nation states as actors, at least over short time horizons.

Our openness is a clear window through which our leaders' payoffs remain visible, making it easy for adversaries to pick the most favorable time to escalate and basically foreclosing our ability to ever surprise our enemies. But the benefits of openness far outweigh its costs. While the openness of democratic societies creates vulnerabilities, it also makes us prosperous. However, this very prosperity introduces new challenges in confronting international aggression. As democracies become wealthier and more liberal, they develop an increasing demand for safety and an aversion to risk, further complicating their ability to deter threats effectively.

Prosperity increases the opportunity cost of death and physical harm. Death is as bad as the life it cuts off prematurely would (counterfactually) have been good. This is mediated through what has been casually named safety culture. You can see safety culture and its impact all over our institutions - FDA trials, building codes, and anything else that can ever so slightly reduce the risk of legible death or injury, notwithstanding its opportunity costs. Our foreign policy apparatus is no exception.

Now, it is perfectly rational to worry more about downside risks when you have more to lose. The problem is our biased assessment of risk itself. We are hypersensitized to short term, legible risks and impervious to diffused, longer term or second order effects. This is unfortunately synergistic with our moral intuitions that are far too concerned with acts of commission while neglecting acts of omission. The FDA would rather protect one healthy volunteer from legible harm that could be attributed to them even if it means a lifesaving drug never makes it to the market.

Similarly, our foreign policy seems narrowly focused on avoiding short term confrontation. Listen to Joe Biden's speeches over the last few months (or assess his actions) - the undertone and sometimes substantive content is something to the effect of "Hey, we really don't want to fight, because fighting is bad. We're rich and we want to keep it that way - so let's really try not to fuck this all up". Unfortunately, this consumerist attitude towards buying safety won't work.

When we pay a price for safety, we think we are buying safety, just as we'd buy anything else. "Here, we will give up some of our power or wealth and let you be a bully because our life is damn good and we want 1 more year of it". Notice that the supply of safety is controlled by the other side. They know that you have a deep almost never ending demand for safety. So if they have more safety to sell you, you'll buy it. This process can basically carry on forever unless you make them pay for breaking this contract - by communicating a red line. Do the words "red line" ring a bell?

Consider something more concrete. The American public is terrified of anything that could lead to nuclear escalation with Russia, which is palpable in America's lack of total resolve in supporting Ukraine in a defensive war. It's totally rational to not want nuclear war. But it's unclear that really not wanting nuclear war makes nuclear war less likely. This is because the concession we're typically making is still exacting a cost from us. Weakening our credibility or power that we spend resources and human capital to build is still a cost since ultimately, different sources of power - be they economic or military or something else - are fungible. So at some point, America can't not respond. And when it does, it will face an adversary that believes we are likely to back down if they push us hard. So if you can reason by induction, you would have long figured out that there's no way for this to end well, if your adversary believes the cost you will pay to avoid conflict is arbitrarily high.

This is the point at which someone will accuse me of relying "too much on theoretical frameworks", at which point I will ask them to demonstrate the actual logical leaps I have made. Then they will say something like "C'mon, your adversary doesn't believe they can keep pushing you without consequence". It might be useful to remember that this relationship is adversarial. That means you either have no direct channel of communication or that even if you do, each party has an incentive to deceive and lie for strategic advantage. This is why adversaries have to analyze all the signals they receive from each other - what they say but more importantly what they do. So if we act like we would do pretty much anything to avoid military confrontation, perhaps our adversary knows it doesn't mean we literally have no limits. But they have no idea what those limits are, because we don't draw lines in the sand with credibility. Red lines, ring any bell yet?

I've spent all this real estate bitching and moaning about the handicaps of openness and democracy. I probably come across as envious of our morally bankrupt adversaries and their ability to withhold information and gain strategic advantage. Nothing could be further from the truth. Democracies should play to their strengths and embrace transparency. We should clearly and honestly state what we care about most, broadcast our promises and threats to the whole world and then follow up on those promises and threats.

The reality is that we don't draw lines in the sand because we don't know what we're willing to fight for and what we're not. We don't even have a coherent political conversation about our foreign policy goals and aspirations. This is especially strange for a country that has historically maintained a lot more democratic pressure on its foreign policy apparatus, relative to our allies across the Atlantic.

We should be clear about what our goals are and what we want in the world and what we will absolutely fight for. There are other less important things we can have strategic ambiguity around. That gives people a sense of what we will fight for and what we want. This saves everyone time.