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

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