Chatter: Why Foreign Policy Elites Matter with Elizabeth Saunders
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2024
⏱️ 84 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The "deep state." The "blob." Foreign policy elites are often so labeled, misunderstood, and denigrated. But what influence on presidents and on public opinion do they actually have?
Elizabeth Saunders, professor of political science at Columbia, has researched this topic deeply and written about it in her new book, The Insiders' Game. David Priess spoke with her about her path to studying foreign policy, the ups and downs of archival research, the meaning of foreign policy "elites," the differences between the influences of Democratic and Republican elites, a counterfactual President Al Gore's decisionmaking about invading Iraq, pop cultural representations of foreign policy elites, how heightened polarization changes the dynamics of elite influence, and more.
Among the works mentioned in this episode:
The book The Insiders' Game by Elizabeth Saunders
The book Leaders at War by Elizabeth Saunders
The TV show The West Wing
The movie The Hunt for Red October
The TV show The Diplomat
The TV show The Americans
The movie Thirteen Days
The article "Politics Can't Stop at the Water's Edge" by Elizabeth Saunders, Foreign Policy (March/April 2024)
Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.
Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
| 0:04.0 | To access an ad-free version of the Lawfair Podcast, |
| 0:08.0 | become a material supporter of Lawfair at Patreon.com slash Lawfair. That's Patreon.com |
| 0:16.4 | slash Lawfair. Also check out Lawfair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, lawfare no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:30.0 | Welcome to Chatter. I'm David Prius. This week political scientist and author Elizabeth |
| 0:37.8 | Saunders on why foreign policy elites matter. To say someone is a foreign policy elite just means that they devote a lot of their time to thinking |
| 0:47.9 | about foreign policy. |
| 0:48.9 | Doesn't make them better or worse. |
| 0:50.8 | It doesn't make them superior. It doesn't mean that they necessarily would be that great if you threw them in a think tank and asked them to talk about health care because they don't follow those debates. |
| 1:01.0 | Elite are really important for accountability. |
| 1:04.0 | If the voters can only do it every four years, |
| 1:07.0 | they need those elites to be passing judgment in a substantive way. |
| 1:11.0 | Not all of them, but some of them have to. |
| 1:14.7 | We want to understand the political incentives that drove these presidents and not sweep |
| 1:19.6 | them under the rug because if we are trying to improve policy and our understanding of how |
| 1:23.8 | policy gets made a broad brush demonization of everybody who makes these |
| 1:27.8 | decisions is is not going to get us very far. are. |
| 1:36.0 | Elizabeth Saunders, thank you for joining me. |
| 1:38.0 | Thanks for having me. |
| 1:39.0 | I'm really excited to be here. |
| 1:40.0 | As you know, but our listeners don't know until right now, I've been |
| 1:44.9 | interested in having you on here for quite a while now. I think I first reached |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Lawfare Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Lawfare Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.