This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009. I'm

Caleb Brown. American foreign policy was constrained for much of the last

60 years by that other great power, the Soviet Union.

But now what constrains the American urge to maintain primacy?

Justin Logan, Associate Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute explains.

It took Dwight Eisenhower to tell us, you know, you better look out about this creeping military industrial

complex. It takes apparently the Defense Secretary, President Obama, a whole host of experts to say, yeah, maybe this F-22 funding, generally

a pretty small part of the defense budget, isn't necessary.

And if it takes that kind of inertia to stop something pretty small,

you know, what hope is there that we could actually turn the tide on a USA that wants to have its thumb at every pie internationally?

Well, I think the F-22 is one small case for the general argument that I'm attempting to make in this paper

and that's that it's not just the sort of military industrial congressional complex that obviously has an interest in an expansive American grand strategy.

But more broadly, there are really no interests inside Washington, D.C. that are pressing for a less

interventionist strategy. From a sort of domestic politics standpoint, a lot of the debates that we see, and I'm indebted to our colleague

Ben Friedman for this insight, are sort of kept from either extreme by warring factions. So if you take for example the debate over abortion, the

debate over gun control, the debate over environmental policy.

There are two sides to each of those debates,

which tend to, by virtue of their clashing over time,

you get movement if you have sort of a football field analogy.

We may be on one 45 yard line or on another 45 yard line, but we generally don't tend to get

into either side's end zone. And in the sort of debate over US Grand Strategy,

there really aren't a great deal of countervailing forces on the domestic

...