A familiar drumbeat: Michael Mazarr on the run-up to the Iraq invasion and parallels with China
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2022
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Cynical Podcast, a weekly discussion to current affairs in China, produced in partnership with the China Project. |
| 0:15.5 | Subscribe to Access from the China Project to get access, access to not only our great daily newsletter, but all the |
| 0:21.8 | original writing on our website as well at theChinaproject.com. We cover everything from China's |
| 0:27.7 | fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs |
| 0:32.3 | and other Muslim peoples in China's Xinjiang region to Beijing's ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a |
| 0:39.1 | post-carbon footing. It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation |
| 0:44.5 | that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor. I'm Kaiser Guo, |
| 0:50.5 | coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. For anyone who's listened to this |
| 0:54.5 | program at all, it should be probably no surprise to you that I've been for several years now very |
| 0:59.1 | alarmed at the escalating rhetoric coming out of American policymakers and opinion leaders when it |
| 1:04.7 | comes to China. I've expressed my share of displeasure at the group think that seems to have such a |
| 1:10.3 | hold on China analysis in Washington, |
| 1:12.8 | at the way national security is crowded out every other consideration when it comes to thinking about China, |
| 1:18.3 | and, of course, at the way the very loyalties to the U.S. of anyone holding a different set of assumptions |
| 1:25.0 | about China's intentions and its ambitions, |
| 1:32.6 | a different ordering of priorities, or even a different take on how things got to where they are today, |
| 1:36.4 | how those loyalties can be called into question. |
| 1:41.3 | Not explicitly on this show that I can recall, but certainly in other public venues, |
| 1:45.6 | I have voiced real concern, particularly in the last couple of years, |
| 1:52.3 | that things are feeling an awful lot like 2002, that the drumbeat is sounding very familiar, |
| 1:59.1 | that certain media figures seem all too eager to step into the role of Judith Miller, |
| 2:02.1 | that it feels as though there's an effort being made to manufacture consent for a war with China in the Western Pacific. |
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