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Sources of Foreign Policy

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Yglesias:

People generally understand that the domestic politics of a large liberal democracy reflect a contending set of interests in which the controlling coalition need have no relationship to the true interests of the nation. America’s agriculture policy, for example, reflects the interests of ranchers, corn, soybean, and cotton farmers rather than vegetable growers or food consumers. But this same thing happens in foreign policy…

This kind of thinking can sometimes reflect an accurate assessment of what’s good for the country. But it’s also redolent with interest group capture. When the USA assembles a large coalition of allies that is, among other things, a large coalition of customers for American defense contractors. What’s more, the allies then often need defending, both in terms of military bases and general expeditionary capabilities. So we have a controlling domestic political coalition that’s defined our “interests” in the Middle East as consisting of collecting a large and diversified portfolio of local allied regimes who we then directly and indirectly subsidize. But the proposition that this reflects the real interests of the American population is contestable. The connection to real interests is that the price of gasoline is very important to the welfare of the average American household, and that Middle Eastern politics are important to the price of gasoline.

What Yglesias is suggesting is that there’s no such thing as the “national interest”; rather, different groups within society have different foreign policy interests. There may be broad swaths of agreement on certain interests, but even in these cases distributional preferences may differ. That this point is incredibly obvious and cannot be whispered by anyone with a serious interest in working for the United States government is unfortunate, but not particularly contradictory. I tend to find explanation of US government policy that center on “the Village” and other similar constructs sloppy and prone to over-explanation, but surely the uncontested idea that there IS a national interest that can be pursued without reference to interest group politics stands as pillar of elite domination of foreign policy debate.

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