This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 2nd, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What are the widely held beliefs about foreign policy about the interactions of nations

that lead us astray when considering

potential military action.

Richard Nannia is author of the new book Public Choice Theory and the

illusion of grand strategy where he argues that the public choice perspective is key to understanding

the most important aspects of American foreign policy.

For people who don't follow foreign policy debates about foreign policy studies very closely.

We should probably do some preview like you do in your book.

And so briefly describe the unitary actor model

and why you think it doesn't hold up.

So in international relations,

yeah, the unitary actor model is basically that you treat states as

independent actors and you build your model based on that. So it's analogous and

you know borrowed from economics where in microeconomics you take the individual

you assume the individual is rational and then you predict a lot you know you predict

things about the world and you try to explain the world from that perspective.

So in international relations, this is basically our starting point.

It's not, you know, for everybody, though it feels very diverse and there's a lot of, you know,

debates about different things, but basically if you're

going to say you know international relations is based on one thing that makes it

...