China & the Stupidity of War
2022-02-14 · Guest: John Mueller (Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute) · 52:28
The Stupidity of War and International Conflict
Bob Zadek interviews John Mueller about his book The Stupidity of War. They discuss the historical decline of international conflict, the obsolescence of conquest, and why American foreign policy consistently overstates threats from nations like Russia, China, and North Korea.
Topics: Foreign Policy, International Security, War, NATO, Russia, China, North Korea, Threat Perception, Cato Institute
Speakers: Bob Zadek, John Mueller
Introduction and the Decline of International War [00:17]
Bob Zadek: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. The show of ideas, never once the show of attitude. Thank you so much for listening this Sunday morning.
Do you all agree with me that—well, I’m going to offer a complex thought and tickle your brains on this Sunday morning. Isn’t war kind of stupid? Yeah, I guess it is. I guess it is pretty stupid. The stupidity of war is the subject of a recent book written by this morning’s guest. The full title is The Stupidity of War: American Foreign Policy and the Case for Complacency. Complacency, yes, in foreign policy. The book was published last year. It has become widely read. Hopefully, it will become the guiding principle of American foreign policy going forward. And we take the first giant step towards influencing government to in fact concede the stupidity of war by inviting the author of that book to join us this morning.
And with that introduction, I’m happy to welcome to the show John Mueller. John is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He’s a member of the Political Science Department and a senior research scientist with the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at OSU, Ohio State University. He is an expert on terrorism—not, of course, on the conduct of terrorism, but on the world’s reaction to terrorism, its understanding of terrorism. He has written many books specifically on war, on terror, and on foreign policy. And if I just run down briefly the titles of some of John’s books, you will get a good sense of what you have in store for you for the upcoming hour together. John has written Terror, Security and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security. Why wasn’t that book widely read and listened to by government? He has also written Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats and Why We Believe Them. He has also written Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda. And last on the list, but not the last in the list of John’s books—they go on—but the last book I will just highlight by way of introducing John to you was War, Presidents and Public Opinion and Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War. John, thank you so much for joining us this morning on the show.
John Mueller: Thanks. Great to be here.
Bob Zadek: And thanks for all of your work over so many years on trying to bring sanity to our foreign policy. Now, we start with a very—a three-letter word which is a common thread in many of your books: war. Now, you observe in your books war has been declining, probably since World War II, although threat perception by government, the need for war or warlike activities, continues to grow. So first, tell us a bit, or help us understand the source of your observation that war has declined since World War II. After all, it seems to many of us that we are and have been in a constant state of war. It seems like we are always at war. It’s permanent. So tell us about your observation that war has actually declined. And when you do, help us understand that very simple word, “war.” What does it mean as you use it in your observations?
John Mueller: Yes, what I’m talking about is war, particularly international war, which is the way nations fight each other to settle their disputes. And since 1945, we’ve had 75 years without a war among developed states. World War III, in other words, never happened. And also international war has been declining elsewhere. There are a fair number of wars, like between Israel and Muslim states, and between Pakistan and India, but those haven’t been around really for about 30 years. There’s only been about four international wars in the last 30 years.
And I think the main reason for this was a decline in the idea that war is a good idea, or another way of putting it was that war is really stupid. International war is really stupid. And that took place—the change in opinion really took place after World War I. After World War I, people sat around saying, “Well, that was really stupid. We should not do that again.” They tried to keep it from happening, unsuccessfully obviously because of Hitler. And then starting again after World War II, and for the most part, it has been a major success. Europe, which used to be the cauldron of wars, has had essentially no wars, international wars, since that time, though we’re now of course on the verge of some problems with Ukraine, which might break the streak. Nonetheless, Europe has been at peace from freedom from substantial international war for the longest period of time since the word “Europe” was invented about 2,500 years ago. So it seems to me that’s very consequential. Countries continue to have many, many problems, and they do a lot of things which I don’t consider to be war, and they aren’t directly killing people. They sometimes intervene in civil wars, they exact economic sanctions, they may sling cyber balloons and so forth. And they may have minor conflicts, very small conflicts, along the borders in some places, not but not near cities or not near garrisons. So there’s still plenty of things going on, but they don’t use direct war in the way that is—it’s a change of historical proportions, perhaps the most important ever, that something as hallowed and sanctified and common as international war, which has been there forever, has basically been given up by a large number of countries, and increasingly it seems to be pretty much all of them.
The Obsolescence of Conquest [07:56]
Bob Zadek: If one can generalize—this is going to be, I fear, hard to generalize, but I’m sure going to try—war is a policy adopted by a country to achieve a specific goal. I guess the goal is conquest. Whatever that means, but conquest itself is a squirrely kind of word. So what has been—in when we had wars, what—can you generalize about what the goal of the war was? And have nations stopped seeking that conquest as a goal, or have they just adopted other ways of achieving it: economic, cyber, political disruption, and the like? Has it been a change in collective foreign policy or simply a change in method?
John Mueller: Well, the idea of conquest—I mean, no one has been conquered by cyber. No one’s been conquered by economic means either. Essentially, that was the original idea going after World War I. That before World War I, there were a large number of people who said not only war is good because you can conquer people, but because it’s glorious and beautiful and wonderful and ennobling and manly and so forth, whereas peace is decadent and trivial and materialistic and filled with bovine content, as one historian put it. Those ideas basically vanished almost completely after World War I.
And the idea then was, however, basically following what you’re saying, that war, whatever the reason for the war, conquest or taking over territory, is frequently the sort of general reason or the way the war is carried out, even if it was fought over a matter of, for example, honor, besmirchment of honor. And so the idea with the League of Nations was to divide up the whole world into a bunch of countries called states, and that the borders would be fixed and you couldn’t change them by war. You could change them peacefully if there was—if people agreed to it, to be taken over by another country, but you couldn’t do it through war.
Then we had, of course, wars of conquest by Mussolini and Hitler and Japan during World War II, and that sort of reified the idea that we have to basically stop the idea of conquest. So since 1945, that’s been the principle. You cannot change borders, you cannot change—take over countries by conquest anymore, even though the old slogan was “I came, I saw, I conquered,” you know, been going on for millennia. And since World War II, there’s only been one case in which a United Nations member has tried to take over another United Nations member and incorporate it into its own territory, and that was when Iraq took over Kuwait in 1990. We’ll have to see what’s going to happen now, obviously, with Ukraine. But that’s a record of 75 years in which there’s been no conquest in that sense. There have been various border conflicts and even sometimes fights over territory between countries and so forth, but there’s been no case of—besides that one—of a United Nations country taking over another United Nations country. And that’s just like totally unprecedented for the history of the human race, effectively.
Why Do We Still Have “Enemies”? [11:43]
Bob Zadek: If since that is the case, and since implicit in that is that it’s unlikely that there will be an instance—there might be a small instance, but nothing in the scale of World War II—if it is unlikely for that to occur again, then what does it mean for us to have what are perceived to be enemies? Why exactly is Russia our enemy, if they are? Why is China our enemy, if it is? Why is Iran an enemy, if it is? If you would have us believe that the risk of crossing our borders, the risk of conquest, is almost nonexistent? If it’s nonexistent, then what exactly are we afraid of that puts us in such a strong defensive posture?
John Mueller: Well, it’s a little bit hard to explain the full military thing. But the issue basically is that people still have disagreements, big time. But what they don’t—my argument is what they don’t use is direct war to settle them, which is what they used to do in the olden days. So they do it through negotiation, they may do it through various kinds of pressure, they may do it from sometimes rattling rockets and so forth, and they may do it through economic pressures or they may try to do it. But they don’t use direct war to settle their differences. That’s the difference.
So you still have enemies. There’s certainly plenty of things in China which I don’t like, and in Russia which I don’t like, and a lot of people don’t like, of course. And we don’t like the way those countries are going. But it seems to me basically that they don’t present a threat, a security threat, to the United States. For example, the argument with China is that as it grows, it’ll seek to have more influence in the world and might even become what some people call a hegemon. I never quite figured out what those two words, “influence” and “hegemon,” mean. If it means they’re going to be more important, that if you want to sell something to China, you better pay attention to what China thinks and vice versa, that’s I suppose a form of influence, but it’s certainly not—it’s pretty much benign. Neither China nor Russia, I think, has territorial ambitions of the sort, for example, that Hitler had. They do want to play a bigger role in the international stage, and they do want to have more respect, but so does everybody else. And it seems to me we should basically service those rather vaporous goals in many cases.
There’s probably places where we should be working much more together. For example, United States and Russia working on trying to put Syria back in one piece, or the United States, China, and Iran and Russia working to try to bring stability to Afghanistan after that catastrophic 20-year war. So there’s lots of places where you can get cooperation. Obviously, you have to have cooperation on global warming and things like that as well, and international trade will continue to grow and obviously you want to enhance that. But people—countries still do have disagreements, intense ones frequently, bitter ones that go on for decades. But the point is that they don’t use, as they once used, international war to settle those differences.
Specific Disagreements: Ukraine and Taiwan [15:23]
Bob Zadek: When you say we have disagreements, it’s strange, John. As you were speaking, I was trying to, as I formulated my next question, I was trying to select—and I just couldn’t—where specifically the United States and Russia, what exactly those two countries disagree on? Now, forgetting about small issues for the minute, and forgetting about form of government—comma, who cares about form of government that each country adopts—I could not, to form my next question, identify specifically what is a perfect example of where, to use your word, the US and Russia disagree. And I was going to say China, but of course we disagree on Taiwan. But Taiwan is a somewhat unique situation. And while we have treaty and other promises regarding Taiwan, what happens in Taiwan doesn’t directly affect life in the United States. So if you don’t mind, could you just, to put a little flesh on the bones, what is an example, a big example, of where either of those superpowers and the United States disagree specifically on something?
John Mueller: Yeah, well, we can talk about Ukraine. Thanks for bringing up Taiwan. I should have mentioned that before, that is obviously a territorial issue that goes back 75 years and so forth. In terms of the current crisis, such as it is, in Ukraine, what happened was at the end of the Cold War, the United States said there wasn’t anything more for NATO to deal with because they didn’t have their enemy anymore. And instead, NATO gradually expanded to bring in more countries. And in many respects, that was a pretty good thing.
But what happened was that even then—this is long before Yeltsin—the Russians were making it clear that they were made very uncomfortable by having NATO, a military alliance, come closer and closer to them. And they said this repeatedly. And it was escalated after 2000 when Putin came into power, but it’s a broad-range thing. It’s the Western-oriented elites in the 1990s were saying this. Now, I think they’re basically wrong. I think the expansion of NATO is basically a peaceful alliance that’s trying to spread its—you know, increase its magnitude and so forth and should not have been seen to be a threat to Russia. But Russians of all sorts, not just the super-nationalists or ex-communists, did see it that way.
And what has been the problem is the United States has refused effectively, and NATO have refused basically, to see that the Russians see this as a security threat. And the Russians now have been trying to get the attention of the United States and NATO for several years. And this buildup across the border, I think, is designed mainly with that intent. The only time anybody pays attention to Russia, which in many cases in many respects is a declining power, is when they’re doing something like that. So to a degree, we got into this disagreement about the West and the United States not intending to offend Russia, but having done so anyway, and then refusing basically to say, “I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to do that,” etc., and to worry about what they see as their security concerns. You may think their security concerns are nonsense, and I do, and so does NATO and so does the United States, but that doesn’t mean much of anything if you’ve offended somebody. Offense lies in the eyes of the offended. If someone’s offended, they’re offended. And even if you didn’t intend to do so, you should do something about it.
Now, in the current case, there seems to be a fairly easy way out, almost ludicrously simple, which is to put a moratorium on letting Ukraine into NATO. As a matter of plain unadulterated fact, no one wants Ukraine in NATO anywhere, for several reasons. One is plenty of countries that don’t want them at all. The other is that Ukraine in many cases is an economic basket case. It has border conflicts all over the place, including with Moldova. And it also is unbelievably corrupt. In fact, it has become the poorest country in Europe, which is really spectacular. At the end of 1991, when everybody was liberated, it had a GDP per capita about the same as Poland. Now its GDP per capita is about less than one-third of Poland’s. And so it needs to get its act together before it could even be a credible candidate to join NATO. And everybody agrees that’s going to take decades, maybe generations, for that to happen.
So consequently, to put into a moratorium, which would assuage the Russians and would be called, of course, appeasement, would be basically cost-free because you’re not going to do it anyway. You probably could balance that by getting some sort of agreement, a non-aggression agreement, from the Russians. And so there is a fairly easy way out. It’s just that both sides don’t see that as the possibility at the current time. And even many of the NATO countries, as I say, don’t say it publicly, but they’ll say it privately. So there you get a case of a disagreement. It’s conceivable this one will erupt in war, but the Russians do not seem to want to go to war. They’ve said it repeatedly. And in fact, now what they’re saying, both Putin and the Foreign Ministry, they’re saying this warlike buildup in the West is designed to provoke us to do something which would be to start a war in Ukraine so they could have an excuse for expanding economic sanctions. In other words, they think they’re being snookered into war as opposed to planning it on their own. I’m not sure that’s true. They certainly have been saying they don’t want to go to war, and they have no intention of going to war, and they have no plans to go to war multiple times. Maybe they’ve been lying all that time, but we’ll have to see on that. But anyway, it’s a case where you get a disagreement. Thus far, of course, everything has remained non-military in the sense of no one is shooting at anybody, and maybe that’ll stay the same. Maybe it’ll just descend into a long-term stalemate as well. We’ll have to see.
North Korea and Nuclear Proliferation [22:45]
Bob Zadek: Does the United States have any—I tickled this question a little earlier, I want to come back to it—does the United States have any other countries on earth that are our enemy, as that word is commonly used? Do we have any enemies at all to fear?
John Mueller: No, I don’t think we have enemies to fear, but we have enemies. There’s countries we strongly disagree with, like North Korea and Iraq and certain aspects of China and Russia. But I don’t think any of those present a security threat to the United States, nor are likely to be solved by military means. So we don’t need this massive military apparatus to deal with it as well.
Bob Zadek: And when you say we disagree with North Korea, we don’t approve of what they’re doing, but isn’t most of our disapproval internal to North Korea? North Korea is not trying to influence the United States or to take over the United States. So do we really even—we may disapprove, and I’m not trying to parse words, but there’s a big difference between disapproval, which is somewhat passive, and disagreement where your dukes are up and your fists are clenched. Do we really disagree with North Korea in the sense that they represent—now sure, they—I can’t speak to it because I’m uninformed on their testing of ICBMs and their testing of nuclear—their testing with aggressive military hardware. Putting that aside, I don’t know enough about it and I don’t want to go discuss it because I can’t, I’m not competent to. But do we really even disagree with them in the sense that they represent a threat to us?
John Mueller: Yeah, they—I don’t think they represent a threat to us, but sometimes people see it that way. There’s a disagreement again, it’s basically out of misperception in a lot of ways. North Korea got nuclear weapons after George W. Bush said there’s an axis of evil in the world and named the three countries. The first one he named was North Korea. And then he went, of course, shortly thereafter into a war against another member of the axis of evil, namely Iraq. At that point, North Korea withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and started working on nuclear weapons.
My book argues, and also it’s done in that earlier book you mentioned, Atomic Obsession, that nuclear proliferation really isn’t much of a threat. There’s been a fair amount of proliferation since 1945, but it has basically been not consequential. There’ve been a large number of countries that had thought about getting nuclear weapons, decided it simply wasn’t worth the candle. North Korea had been—obviously changed its mind when it thought it was going to be attacked by the United States because of the axis of evil issue, and it has now of course developed nuclear weapons. They see them, and I think they are, basically just a deterrent and a defense. If they really wanted to pulverize South Korea, by the way, they could do it very easily with artillery. They don’t need nuclear weapons. But they think they need it, and it’s foolish to think you can argue them out of that in the short term. Maybe longer term, but in the short term.
Meanwhile, the issue with North Korea—and this is in the book and I also did a separate paper on it, a Cato policy analysis paper—would be to back-burner the nuclear issue. Return to it maybe later, but right now just forget about it because that’s something they’re just not going to give on. You can’t go through a closed door. And but North Korea has also made noises about trying to become a more normal country by gradually freeing up their economy the way China has, and they even think about Singapore. And they have done some of that, not a lot, under Kim Jong-un. But it seems to me that what we should be doing is working with that to make them into sort of a normal country. And the possibilities are pretty good. I don’t think they’re perfect by any means, but I think they’re really quite good that working with him, stoking his ego, cooperating with him on business ventures and so forth, might be a way of gradually mellowing at least the economic issue within North Korea and potentially the political one as well. This would take decades, but I think the opportunity is there. In many respects, we should get out of it entirely and let the South Koreans take the lead, and under President Moon, they’ve been interested in doing that. So I think the policy in North Korea, as in so many other places, has been wildly misfocused. And the idea that we have to get rid of nuclear weapons in North Korea first is just a hopelessly ludicrously ridiculously issue to approach the thing. It’s basically something that’s not going to be possible, certainly in the short run. But there is possibilities at another—going at it at a different angle.
The Exaggeration of Threats [28:31]
Bob Zadek: In your book, you explain to us that in so many examples—and I’ll invite you to offer a through a few of them now to prove your point—that mistakes, if I can use that word, in American foreign policy involving the exaggeration of threats, the overstatement in order to garner support from the population, the overstatement of threats is a go-to tool in American foreign policy toolbox. It is proven to be a very effective device in order to support military buildups, to in order to enable the government to devote enormous and divert enormous resources to goals that government sees incorrectly to be important but really are not objectively. And in short, you have pointed out to your readers many examples of how there has been an exaggeration of threats. And of course, every living American has lived through many of them. We’ve discussed many on our show. So give us some examples of how in a military context, how the exaggeration of the threat by our government to the population has been used to justify the enormous waste of resources and attention.
John Mueller: Well, there’s quite a few. I do want to say, however, that although they exaggerate threats, they are not always successful. There’s been an effort to try to exaggerate the threat I think about Russia and Ukraine and it’s not selling well. So frequently, the threat exaggerators don’t—aren’t successful. But every successful—every threat that has been successfully sold has then been exaggerated.
Probably the most impressive area in this is in during the Cold War, and I have a whole chapter on that. The argument was that because the Soviet Union had allowed North Korea to attack South Korea, that therefore it was hell-bent on conquest throughout the whole world and would, in very short order, be willing to attack Western Europe in particular, which is why NATO, which was just a thing on paper before that, suddenly escalated massively and particularly militarily. Now, it was pretty obvious during the Cold War, and a few people said this, such as George Kennan and Bernard Brodie, two important defense analysts, that the Russians never had the slightest—the Soviets never had the slightest interest in getting into anything that could remotely resemble World War II again, much less one with nuclear weapons. And they were not likely to attack Western Europe, though they were, as they said a billion times in their propaganda, interested in supporting revolutionary movements in all kinds of countries and revolutionary civil wars in other ones.
But nonetheless, this was basically sold, the idea that they’re a major threat, and we spent trillions of dollars on it. One calculation is that the amount of money spent on nuclear weapons and the delivery systems during the Cold War was about enough to buy everything in the United States except for the land. That’s a lot of money, even though a trillion dollars isn’t nearly as much as it was in those days. That sort of puts it in context. Information coming out from the Soviet archives after the Cold War indicate that they never, never, never planned to—they had no plans whatever to attack Western Europe. They were planning to defend themselves if they were attacked, but they never did. And what you need to do is find somebody in the Soviet Union from a top commissar to a drunk on a park bench who said, “You know, World War II was really wonderful. We had a great time in it and we won. We ought to really do that again.” You’d need to find somebody, anybody, who’s ever said that in the Soviet Union. And I think instead what they would say things like what Khrushchev said: “Comrades abroad say that Khrushchev’s afraid of war. I’d like to see the bloody fool who isn’t afraid of war. I lost my son in that war. Every Russian family lost somebody in that war, except for those families which lost the whole families. We never want to do anything like that again.” It was perfectly obvious that they felt that way, but they still had revolutionary ambitions, of course, as I indicated. But we nonetheless militarized a huge amount to deal with that.
Very famously, one of the few people—and I just document this quite extensively in my book—who would agree with my position on this was Dwight Eisenhower. He had met with these guys. He had—the traumatic experience for him apparently was when in 1945, when he was still general, he flew to Moscow to talk with Stalin. Then on the way back, he was flying low enough, or there was no clouds or whatever, and he looked down and he said, “The whole place has been destroyed. It’s destruction from one end to the other. They’re never going to want to do that again.” And he really believed that through his whole presidency. But when he left the presidency, he argued that the reason we’re spending so much money on defense is because of the machinations of the military-industrial complex. But the reason the military-industrial complex was so successful at getting huge expenditures for defense was because they believed that the Soviet Union was going to attack Western Europe or maybe the United States, something that Eisenhower didn’t believe. So Eisenhower in that case was actually being a political coward. He was afraid, even going out of office, that he couldn’t say what he really truly believed, namely that they weren’t going to start another war. And he let the military-industrial complex have the argument that made their protests and efforts a success.
So that’s just one example. Obviously, terrorism, international terrorism, we all remember that how that’s an existential threat to the United States. After 9/11, everybody apparently in intelligence thought we’re soon going to be hit by a bigger one, and the threat could be even existential. I never figured out what existential meant. I guess it means all farmers stop growing food, we all starve to death, we tear up the Constitution, and we all commit hara-kiri, I don’t know what it means. But obviously, the Al-Qaeda has proved to be pretty much Al-Qaeda Central has proved to be pretty much like Lee Harvey Oswald, the guy who shot John Kennedy, a fundamentally trivial entity that got horribly lucky once. So that’s just a couple examples of massive, massive inflation. In the case of—I’ve done a lot of studies of counter-terrorism expenditures in the United States, which have been about $2 trillion. That’s just in the United States, not the wars overseas. And with that amount of money, in order to be successful from a cost-benefit standpoint, you have to demonstrate that you’ve stopped one $4 billion attack every two weeks for every year since 9/11. In other words, it’s just been an incredible waste of money to deal with a threat that was really quite minor. The number of people who die from terrorism, Islamist terrorism in the United States, is about five per year since 9/11, maybe six. That doesn’t demonstrate much of the way of an existential threat.
Threat Perception of China and Russia Today [37:03]
Bob Zadek: So is it your conclusion that—I think most Americans, to go back to a word I used earlier in the show, most Americans softly believe that China is more our enemy than not, if there are degrees of being an enemy. And the same with Russia. But having—if I can start from that premise, are we threatened in any way, in any way, by China, Russia, or any other nation so as to justify the enormous—because your book is about war and I want to be true to the topic for this morning—are we justified in any way, if we assume they are enemies, an assumption I don’t really buy, but if we assume that, is the threat one of military attack so as to justify the enormous expenditure we have on even conventional weapons: tanks and jeeps and guns? All this conventional stuff, what I can’t imagine ever, other than skirmishes, I can’t imagine any of those weapons ever being used in our defense. So is there any justification from a foreign policy standpoint for the buildup of the military arsenal if there’s a ridiculously low or nonexistent likelihood that they’ll ever be used? Or does their existence prevent a war and is it necessary to make sure nobody declares a war because they perceive they are militarily superior?
John Mueller: Yeah, well, my book basically is in consonance with what you’ve been arguing. I don’t see China really as an enemy. And if you read people, you know, who are anti-China hawks in the United States, they worry about things like taking over Taiwan, which is a legitimate issue, a very special one. But then after they take over Taiwan, they’re going to take over Japan or the Philippines or whatever else, and there’s no evidence for that in any sense whatever. They just keep spouting it, and sometimes it sells pretty well. But there are problems. Obviously, there’s a threat in a sense of China stealing secrets and stuff like that, which has been facilitated more by the cyber explosion and so forth. But those do not constitute security threats in my view, and they don’t require—and they certainly aren’t going to be solved with tanks and aircraft carriers. So we’ve massively, I think, overspent on the military.
And it should be pointed out that Bernard Brodie, the defense analyst I mentioned earlier, once said is one way of keeping people out of trouble is keeping them from getting the tools with which they can get into it. He was writing very disillusioned in the wake of the Vietnam War. And what he was essentially pointing out was that if we hadn’t had a military in 1965, we couldn’t have gone into that war in Vietnam, which we of course ultimately lost and the communists ultimately won, and a couple million people would not have been killed. Similarly, if we hadn’t had military forces to invade Afghanistan in 2001 or Iraq in 2003, hundreds of thousands of people would not have been killed in those borders and subsequent occupations. So in some respects, having military forces can get you into big trouble.
I do think that the public is generally not inclined to want to get into wars, as we’re seeing currently with respect to the Ukraine thing. But and I think generally speaking since Vietnam, 1975, end of Vietnam, the policy that’s adopted has been generally, as I the phrase I use in my book, which is “vast proclamation and half-vast execution.” You know, you do things like you worry about Bosnia, you wring your hands, but you don’t send troops in until after the war is over, that kind of thing. And I think that’s been pretty much the policy since 1975, with however a major aberration which was caused by 9/11, which really caused intense anxiety, which as I indicated earlier has not been necessary. And that gave the impetus for going into those two wars. I think everybody would agree, any analyst would agree, that the United States would not have gone into either the war in Afghanistan or the one in Iraq had 9/11 not taken place. So it was a shock which we massively overreacted to. But I think now, even under Trump but certainly under Biden, we’re moving back to the vast proclamation and half-vast execution stage, staying out of wars and nonetheless remaining an active and important international citizen.
The “Japan Scare” of the 1990s [42:46]
Bob Zadek: I can remember in the ’90s when Japan was temporarily very strong economically, and I remember the what I consider to be a peaceful 9/11 threat—these are my words only—when a Japanese company, or maybe the government, it was a Japanese company which purchased Rockefeller Center. And to me, that was at the time had feelings of—although it hadn’t happened—9/11. Japan is going to own us. They’re going to own everything. They bought the iconic Rockefeller Center. What else is left that’s—we’re going to no longer be American. And I ask listeners, I wonder if you remember that. The fear was palpable and strong. And it was a fear that Japan would take us over. And I when I was learning from your book and you talked about fear perception, I for some reason flashed back to that tiny event in time—not only the purchasing of the Rockefeller Center, but the quote “invasion” close quote of Japanese cars as a threat to American car manufacturers, and we built standards so US complete—we didn’t have the CAFE standards, but we were in part in economic war with Japan. And the concept of economic war is itself insane because Japan was just giving us exactly what the American public wanted, a theme which is mentioned in your book. So I think that’s an example that I found myself thinking about when you mention and you mention more than once of course in your book this perception of threat from another country that is really quite benign or nonexistent.
John Mueller: Yeah, I totally agree. There’s quite a section in the book on the Japan thing because it really is interesting. If you want to look into it, Japan also did something really criminal: they bought MGM. Think about that. Sony Pictures. Wow. And I used to refer to it as the “Flash Japan Buys Pearl Harbor” syndrome. And there was a book that came out called The Coming War with Japan, published about 1990, ‘91 or something like that, right in the middle of the big concern about Japan. And the guy who wrote that ridiculous book, to say the least, is now head of Stratfor, which is one of the chief prediction agencies working for the Pentagon. The Japan thing is just really right, it’s also interesting by the way that just recently Toyota became the most popular car in the United States, and even though it still has a very suspiciously Japanese name, no one seemed to be squirming over the issue. But the hysteria over Japan, the Japan scare about their buying everything—they’re going to Hawaii and they’re golfing on our golf courses in Hawaii, how can we let the Japanese do it?—that reminds me very much of the concerns about China currently. That eventually and the fears whether they’re going to eventually build up militarily, they’re much smarter than us so they’re going to outclass us in every form of economics and so forth, and they’re going to buy us out. And to a degree that has happened with Toyota in many respects, and Honda and Subaru and so forth. So it is a really good case point, just as you mentioned, just a few years, but it was pure Japan hysteria for those years. I remember it well and discuss it in the book.
The Case for Complacency [47:52]
Bob Zadek: In your book, there’s a word that pops up quite a bit. And as we start to run out of time, and I have my usual end-of-hour anxiety that we didn’t spend as much time with our guest as I would like, but in your book you use the word very persuasively in a very interesting way as a foreign policy principle. And I’d like you to explain it to us. The word is “complacency.” Tell us how that word has a positive meaning as you see foreign policy.
John Mueller: Well, it’s just I try to apply it in various places. In the case of the Cold War, for example, complacency would have been a better policy than deterrence because there was nothing to deter. The Soviet Union was not about to attack the United States. Complacency in terms of other things, such as worrying about them fomenting revolution around the world, would not have—was a legitimate concern in many respects.
Complacency after 9/11 would have been much better than this massive over-expenditure, not only as I mentioned earlier as I discussed earlier about the counter-terrorism in the United States, but of course those two disastrous wars overseas that we shouldn’t have been fought. It would have been better basically to cut back, to go after Al-Qaeda itself, to not take out the Taliban, which was not friendly that much with Al-Qaeda, and to deal with it in a more complacent manner. Complete complacency after 9/11 wouldn’t have made much sense, but as I mentioned earlier in the book, a more moderate complacency, namely a cautious, careful, deliberate, and limited going after this enemy which proved to be mostly smoke and mirrors, and not exaggerating the threat about that there’d be further 9/11s in the immediate future or even the longer future, would have been much better.
Essentially, the complacency might be also applied to China and Russia. What do those countries want? Well, if I’m right, what they want, besides again the Taiwan issue, what they want is to play a bigger role in the world stage. Well, why not? What’s wrong with that? They want to have influence in some countries. Well, they haven’t been doing too well at increasing their influence, neither China nor Russia. But if they want to, so what? So people pay attention to them. Maybe they should. And if they turn out a better product, maybe you’d want to buy it. Why not? In other words, there’s no real threat from that, and being complacent about it and not being upset and not going into hysterics over it is a lot better than various kinds of militarized responses.
So I think in those two cases also with respect to proliferation. I’m sure that people are going to find this very controversial, as I mentioned earlier, but it does not seem to be much of a threat. Countries get the weapons and they don’t do anything about it with them. The number of people that have been killed by nuclear weapons since 1945 is zero. The number of people who have been killed or met their deaths because of anti-proliferation efforts, such as the war in Iraq, is in the hundreds of thousands. If a more complacent attitude toward them, including as I mentioned with Korea, which okay they got nuclear weapons, we don’t like it and maybe eventually we can give them some sweeteners and they’ll get rid of it, but we certainly can’t do it short-term, is a much better policy than constant hysteria and worrying that they’re going to start lobbing those weapons on Alaska or San Diego.
Bob Zadek: We’ve been speaking with John Mueller. John is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He’s a member of the Political Science Department and a senior research scientist with the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University. I urge all of my listeners to read The Stupidity of War: American Foreign Policy and the Case for Complacency. It was written last year. It’s being happily widely read. It will put all of our foreign policy mistakes and perhaps successes in an appropriate context, and it helps you better understand what America is doing in the foreign policy arena. It’ll make you a more informed voter, always a good thing, and help you understand far better what is going on in the world stage. John, thank you so much for your book and thank you for your wisdom during this hour this morning. And to John and to my friends out there, please have a very pleasant rest of the weekend. I’ll be back again next Sunday with the Bob Zadek Show. Thank you, John, and thank you to my friends out there.
John Mueller: Okay, thank you very much.