Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I am your loyal butler of ideas, Andrew Heap.

And I hope you had a good Thanksgiving.

I myself put on three pounds and eight shillings.

When is it a good idea to bomb a country,

arm a country, overthrow its leadership.

Those are the fundamental questions of foreign policy,

what leaders regularly debate in the State Department and Oval Office,

and we're going to discuss that with in the State Department and Oval Office.

And we're going to discuss that with none other than Bill

Crystal, perhaps the most prominent Neocon thinker around.

Bill Crystal was chief of staff for Dan Quayle during the first Bush presidency and a major proponent and apologist for the war in Iraq under George W Bush.

There are two layers to foreign policy.

One is the deeper foundational layer, international relations theory.

Although the word theory doesn't mean it's esoteric or purely academic,

IR theory addresses the root cause of war and how to ameliorate it.

Depending on what you think precipitates war, we'll directly inform your foreign policy.

And we've previously covered the major IR theories on this

program. Realism, liberal internationalism, Marxism, constructivism, I

basically gave my entire master's degree in international politics in about an hour, and I've linked

to that past episode in today's show description if you'd like to check it out.

The other layer of foreign policy is application. Policy and actions, not the tectonic plates of

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