Iran's plan worked because Saudi citizens became (predictably) angry at Israel and even the Saudi leadership can only disregard its citizens opinions to a certain extent. Of course both the Saudi and Israeli leadership realized what Iran was up to. But the Hamas massacre was SO gruesome and abhorrent that no government (including Israel's) could politically afford anything other than a strong military response. Iran/Hamas correctly realized that Israel (not Hamas) would be blamed by the 'Arab street' for deaths of ordinary Gazans being used as human shields. The point is, I don't think any of this is a sign of impulsiveness on the part of leaders but rather leaders feeling compelled to follow the emotional reactions of their citizens.
I think you are largely correct here. I suspect that normalizing relations with Israel is not super popular with the average Saudi to begin with, and the normal public choice theory of dictators (that they have less slack in their decisions than people tend to think) suggests that a sufficient amount of skin would be lost by fighting the average Saudi's opinion on that matter.
Then again, maybe a more popular or slick regime could have spun that such that the Shia were more the enemy than the Jews, and guided public opinion. It's hard to say therefore whether it was impulsive leadership or leadership unable to control the impulsive elephant of the population.
I suspect there's a little more to it than just Saudi leadership listening to its citizens. This line from TFA gives your point: “It’s not Saudi leaders who are acting impulsively,” you might insist. “No, Saudi leaders are strategically responding to the impulsive Saudi public.” But, while true, it misses the point that when events occur often the causation goes in the other direction, albeit indirectly. Leaders, concerned with the reaction of their citizenry, react as they believe a priori that their citizens want. Their reaction in turn gives focus to media coverage of those citizens which itself feeds back to more leadership reaction.
It's all a bunch of non-linear feedback loops that depend on initial conditions.
Always the need to emphasize that innocent civilians are only killed because they’re human shields. Israel totally has no reason to kill lots of Palestinians when opportunity knocks.
Excellent post. My favorite line: "And while national leaders do proverbially have plenty of “skin in the game,” they’re also endowed with an enormous stockpile of skin. Impulsive reactions normally kill pawns, not kings."
Agreed. I impulsively let out a loud chuckle at "endowed with an enormous stockpile of skin."
I might have added that while the skin is plentiful, and probably quite thick in places, leaders are probably not entirely certain as to exactly how plentiful that skin is, and what precise places are thin or thick. In other words, their guesses about what they can get away with might be pretty wrong, and so they might overreact to some things and underreact to others, looking impulsive when they are instead strategically (and unnecessarily) worried.
>"Leaders always have fawning apologists. If a leader was genuinely impulsive, you’d still expect their apologists to paint them as secretly strategically sagacious. So you should listen to such stories with much skepticism."
In addition, due to "proportionality bias", the intuitive assumption is that serious events must have serious causes, and not be due to random impulse
Yeah, it's someone impersonating him. One is named @betonit in Substack but appears as "Bryan Caplan", the other is named @bryancaplan but appears as "Bet on It".
Hamas' preparations to breach Israel's "Maginot Line" were not done impulsively - too well planned and executed. Hamas has hated and been at odds with Israel for a loooong time. Ditto Iran. They've channeled their impulses toward Israel into the plan for the Oct.7th attack.. There had been nothing in the recent or distant past that should have led Hamas to think that the Arab world would simultaneously rise to attack Israel as the reult of the Oct.7th attack. Hence, the attack plan was thorough and not spur of the moment. We ( the Public) don't have enough information to derive the motives for Oct.,7th
The advantage of rational-choice models of politics is that they’re parsimonious and falsifiable. Once you add emotions in, what outcome can’t you explain? But theories that don’t rule anything out are useless.
While I can buy your premise, its not clear these are great examples.
FDR clearly wanted to go to war with Germany, I don't think the odds of that not happening even without the declaration of war are particularly high (even 5% seems to high).
Given the nature of fighting in the Pacific, there really weren't any resources we sent to Europe that would have made the War in the Pacific go much faster.
Declaring War on Japan after just signing a defense pact with them? Very transparent and won't convince anyone.
The reason I was always given is that Germany was fighting a U-boat war in the Atlantic, that winning that U-boat war was the only reasonable way of keeping American goods from getting to Europe, and that declaring war allowed for more unrestricted U-boat warfare. In fact this early part of the war was considered a good time for the U-boats.
I don't really have a strong opinion on this (Germany is fucked either way), but your counter factual seems absurd.
The list of "impulsive behaviors" is also very subjective, to the point that they need to add "inappropriately" to descriptions, because many of these are behaviors that are sometimes appropriate.
P.S. Your foreign policy writing is very weak. Your not even anti-war like libertarians are supposed to be most of the time.
Bryan has stated that Putin is impossible to appease and needs to be confronted.
He specifically chastised Hanania when Ukraine stated over not wanting to support Ukraine.
The context is not lost. Putler wants to conquer the entire world just like Hitler, and any attempt to negotiate is Munich and Appeasement all over again. When he is done with Ukraine, Poland will be next. Bryan echoed the same alarmist rhetoric that was part of the moral panic of the time.
We now know that Ukraine and Russia were close to a peace deal, but the west scuttled it, largely due to the moral panic arguments listed above that Bryan chose to traffic in at the time as well.
Bryan's social circle had a moral panic over Russia. Bravery would have been standing up to that moral panic. Bryan wasn't brave, he bandwagoned. The result has been over a million casualties with no end in sight.
He probably thinks he's brave because he didn't bandwagon over Middle East wars. But Middle East wars were never popular *amongst his social circle*, so there really wasn't any price to pay to be a non-conformist.
He has put out several other pieces arguing that Russia is irrational and dangerous. I've never seen him try to argue to Russia POV or propose a solution it might accept. I have not seen a single comment that criticizes NATO or Ukraine.
Bryan choose to weigh in on this matter. He choose to clearly take a side. He choose to argue for war and confrontation.
If you want to argue that he's right to do those things, go ahead. I can construct a libertarian argument for war (I don't think it applies here, but such an argument exists). But let's not deny them.
What has Saudi Arabia actually done since Oct 7? Not much as far as I can tell. So that doesn't make their leaders seem impulsive (butchering Kashoggi in an embassy, on the other hand...). And, yes, they oppose Iran, but the Biden administration was not so keen on the proxy war the Saudis had been fighting against the Iran-backed Houthi is Yemen, and even removed the Houthis from the State Depts list of terrorist groups (which they are having second thoughts about now). An impulsive Saudi leadership might have broken their peace with the Houthis once ships got attacked, but as far as I can tell they haven't.
A quibble, maybe: surely there's a selection effect, and the most impulsive don't get to a level we notice. But I don't think it's a super big effect, since they probaby outsource non-impulsiveness to their near-psychpathic chief of staff. And yes, of course it helps that they bear no consequences.
We know why Hitler declared war on us after Pearl Harbor. He always planned to go to war against us, but didn't have the required navy yet. Japan did. With Japan at war w/ us, he thought he had all he needed to defeat us. He was wrong.
I don't want this response to forumposter123 to be lost in the weeds, so I'm posting it as other than a reply. Possibly I should have done a more complete search on Ukraine. But the closest thing I found to something making the case that Bryan is pro-war is his post on making it easier for Russians to desert. I would have also liked a post on making it easier for Ukrainians to desert, so I was disappointed that he didn't make the case. Still, I think it's a long step from making it easier for one side to desert to "I'm pro-war."
"impulse rules those who rule us." Don't know about Saudi, Iran or even Israel but in many Western countries (and especially the UK where I live) politicians no longer really rule us..... impulsively or not. In these countries, an MSM party-political psychodrama continues to delude the electorate into assuming that politicians 'rule' whereas in reality political decision-making is something like: 10% politicians / 90% permanent administrative bureaucratic machine.
It's still there and the Houthis are Shias supported by Iran, opposed by the Saudis. Hamas being supported by Iran (despite being Sunni themselves) is closer to an exception. In the Lebanese civil war the Iran-supported Shi'ites of Hezbollah had initially opposed the largely Sunni Palestinians who entered Lebanon from Jordan after Black September, but when Israel invaded in response to the latter Hezbollah fought them until they left
It was quite reliable in Iraq! The central government became dominated by the majority Shia, and the Sunnis basically went into revolt (and, eventually, ISIS.) It's quite true that the Shi'ites didn't share *our* agenda either, but that's a separate issue.
ISIS was supported by Syria and Iran. Syria is ruled by Shi'ites, as is Iran. Iran sponsors Hamas, which is Sunni. The Shi'ite-Sunni split has always been greatly exagerrated.
Tim, that's actually incorrect. Iran was opposed to both ISIS/ISIL and the Sunni rebels in Syria. Iran *does* sponsor Hamas, but that gives you an idea of exactly how much expediency works into these things. The rebels in Iraq, which eventually led to ISIS/ISIL, were opposed to the central government which we helped to stand up and which was dominated by the previously downtrodden Shi'ites (who had pretty close ties to Iran's Shi'ite regime.) Iran also supported the Ba'athist Syrian regime despite having held Saddam's Ba'athist Iraq as a mortal enemy, precisely because they saw the rebels as either Sunni supremacists or as the pawns of Sunni supremacists.
This is a standard modus operandi for Russia & its allies, going back to Dzerzhinsky's "Trust" operation in the 1920s, if not back to the Tsarist secret police. In Russian, it's called "provokatsiya," a.k.a., "controlled opposition" or "reflexive control." Russia and its allies keep doing this, and Western dupes keep falling for it, at least once a decade since.
ISIS was anti-FSA, just like Assad, Putin, Iran, and Hezbollah, who allied together against the FSA.
Why would Saudi Arabia want to re-double its efforts to normalise relations with Israel while witnessing Israel kill tens of thousands of Palestinians?
Iran's plan worked because Saudi citizens became (predictably) angry at Israel and even the Saudi leadership can only disregard its citizens opinions to a certain extent. Of course both the Saudi and Israeli leadership realized what Iran was up to. But the Hamas massacre was SO gruesome and abhorrent that no government (including Israel's) could politically afford anything other than a strong military response. Iran/Hamas correctly realized that Israel (not Hamas) would be blamed by the 'Arab street' for deaths of ordinary Gazans being used as human shields. The point is, I don't think any of this is a sign of impulsiveness on the part of leaders but rather leaders feeling compelled to follow the emotional reactions of their citizens.
I think you are largely correct here. I suspect that normalizing relations with Israel is not super popular with the average Saudi to begin with, and the normal public choice theory of dictators (that they have less slack in their decisions than people tend to think) suggests that a sufficient amount of skin would be lost by fighting the average Saudi's opinion on that matter.
Then again, maybe a more popular or slick regime could have spun that such that the Shia were more the enemy than the Jews, and guided public opinion. It's hard to say therefore whether it was impulsive leadership or leadership unable to control the impulsive elephant of the population.
I suspect there's a little more to it than just Saudi leadership listening to its citizens. This line from TFA gives your point: “It’s not Saudi leaders who are acting impulsively,” you might insist. “No, Saudi leaders are strategically responding to the impulsive Saudi public.” But, while true, it misses the point that when events occur often the causation goes in the other direction, albeit indirectly. Leaders, concerned with the reaction of their citizenry, react as they believe a priori that their citizens want. Their reaction in turn gives focus to media coverage of those citizens which itself feeds back to more leadership reaction.
It's all a bunch of non-linear feedback loops that depend on initial conditions.
Always the need to emphasize that innocent civilians are only killed because they’re human shields. Israel totally has no reason to kill lots of Palestinians when opportunity knocks.
Excellent post. My favorite line: "And while national leaders do proverbially have plenty of “skin in the game,” they’re also endowed with an enormous stockpile of skin. Impulsive reactions normally kill pawns, not kings."
Agreed. I impulsively let out a loud chuckle at "endowed with an enormous stockpile of skin."
I might have added that while the skin is plentiful, and probably quite thick in places, leaders are probably not entirely certain as to exactly how plentiful that skin is, and what precise places are thin or thick. In other words, their guesses about what they can get away with might be pretty wrong, and so they might overreact to some things and underreact to others, looking impulsive when they are instead strategically (and unnecessarily) worried.
>"Leaders always have fawning apologists. If a leader was genuinely impulsive, you’d still expect their apologists to paint them as secretly strategically sagacious. So you should listen to such stories with much skepticism."
In addition, due to "proportionality bias", the intuitive assumption is that serious events must have serious causes, and not be due to random impulse
Is this account fake account for Bet on It? i am so confused that bryan suddenly recommend crypto
Yeah, it's someone impersonating him. One is named @betonit in Substack but appears as "Bryan Caplan", the other is named @bryancaplan but appears as "Bet on It".
Hamas' preparations to breach Israel's "Maginot Line" were not done impulsively - too well planned and executed. Hamas has hated and been at odds with Israel for a loooong time. Ditto Iran. They've channeled their impulses toward Israel into the plan for the Oct.7th attack.. There had been nothing in the recent or distant past that should have led Hamas to think that the Arab world would simultaneously rise to attack Israel as the reult of the Oct.7th attack. Hence, the attack plan was thorough and not spur of the moment. We ( the Public) don't have enough information to derive the motives for Oct.,7th
The advantage of rational-choice models of politics is that they’re parsimonious and falsifiable. Once you add emotions in, what outcome can’t you explain? But theories that don’t rule anything out are useless.
Useful as the null hypothesis perhaps. Given the history of US foreign policy for the last 70 years, maybe the best hypothesis.
While I can buy your premise, its not clear these are great examples.
FDR clearly wanted to go to war with Germany, I don't think the odds of that not happening even without the declaration of war are particularly high (even 5% seems to high).
Given the nature of fighting in the Pacific, there really weren't any resources we sent to Europe that would have made the War in the Pacific go much faster.
Declaring War on Japan after just signing a defense pact with them? Very transparent and won't convince anyone.
The reason I was always given is that Germany was fighting a U-boat war in the Atlantic, that winning that U-boat war was the only reasonable way of keeping American goods from getting to Europe, and that declaring war allowed for more unrestricted U-boat warfare. In fact this early part of the war was considered a good time for the U-boats.
I don't really have a strong opinion on this (Germany is fucked either way), but your counter factual seems absurd.
The list of "impulsive behaviors" is also very subjective, to the point that they need to add "inappropriately" to descriptions, because many of these are behaviors that are sometimes appropriate.
P.S. Your foreign policy writing is very weak. Your not even anti-war like libertarians are supposed to be most of the time.
The Pacific campaign gave us valuable experience w/ amphibious landings, which helped keep D-Day from being even worse than it was.
Byran isn't antiwar? What's an example of a war he has supported?
Ukraine
Really? Cite?
Search both this substack and his twitter for Putin, Ukraine, Russia, etc.
I've certainly read articles by Bryan about how Putin is an evil man, but that doesn't automatically mean Bryan wants the US to attack Russia.
Bryan has stated that Putin is impossible to appease and needs to be confronted.
He specifically chastised Hanania when Ukraine stated over not wanting to support Ukraine.
The context is not lost. Putler wants to conquer the entire world just like Hitler, and any attempt to negotiate is Munich and Appeasement all over again. When he is done with Ukraine, Poland will be next. Bryan echoed the same alarmist rhetoric that was part of the moral panic of the time.
We now know that Ukraine and Russia were close to a peace deal, but the west scuttled it, largely due to the moral panic arguments listed above that Bryan chose to traffic in at the time as well.
Bryan's social circle had a moral panic over Russia. Bravery would have been standing up to that moral panic. Bryan wasn't brave, he bandwagoned. The result has been over a million casualties with no end in sight.
He probably thinks he's brave because he didn't bandwagon over Middle East wars. But Middle East wars were never popular *amongst his social circle*, so there really wasn't any price to pay to be a non-conformist.
He has put out several other pieces arguing that Russia is irrational and dangerous. I've never seen him try to argue to Russia POV or propose a solution it might accept. I have not seen a single comment that criticizes NATO or Ukraine.
Bryan choose to weigh in on this matter. He choose to clearly take a side. He choose to argue for war and confrontation.
If you want to argue that he's right to do those things, go ahead. I can construct a libertarian argument for war (I don't think it applies here, but such an argument exists). But let's not deny them.
What has Saudi Arabia actually done since Oct 7? Not much as far as I can tell. So that doesn't make their leaders seem impulsive (butchering Kashoggi in an embassy, on the other hand...). And, yes, they oppose Iran, but the Biden administration was not so keen on the proxy war the Saudis had been fighting against the Iran-backed Houthi is Yemen, and even removed the Houthis from the State Depts list of terrorist groups (which they are having second thoughts about now). An impulsive Saudi leadership might have broken their peace with the Houthis once ships got attacked, but as far as I can tell they haven't.
A quibble, maybe: surely there's a selection effect, and the most impulsive don't get to a level we notice. But I don't think it's a super big effect, since they probaby outsource non-impulsiveness to their near-psychpathic chief of staff. And yes, of course it helps that they bear no consequences.
We know why Hitler declared war on us after Pearl Harbor. He always planned to go to war against us, but didn't have the required navy yet. Japan did. With Japan at war w/ us, he thought he had all he needed to defeat us. He was wrong.
Hitler declared war on America because America was supplying his enemy (UK) through the Lend-lease program.
The Amerikabomber project began long before Lend-Lease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerikabomber
True. The neoconservatives just don’t get enough credit for their 3D chess: invade Iraq and strengthen Iran! Way to go Cheney and team😀
Withdrawal from Iraq by Obama/Biden is what did that, also allowing for the resurgence of ISIS.
I don't want this response to forumposter123 to be lost in the weeds, so I'm posting it as other than a reply. Possibly I should have done a more complete search on Ukraine. But the closest thing I found to something making the case that Bryan is pro-war is his post on making it easier for Russians to desert. I would have also liked a post on making it easier for Ukrainians to desert, so I was disappointed that he didn't make the case. Still, I think it's a long step from making it easier for one side to desert to "I'm pro-war."
"impulse rules those who rule us." Don't know about Saudi, Iran or even Israel but in many Western countries (and especially the UK where I live) politicians no longer really rule us..... impulsively or not. In these countries, an MSM party-political psychodrama continues to delude the electorate into assuming that politicians 'rule' whereas in reality political decision-making is something like: 10% politicians / 90% permanent administrative bureaucratic machine.
What happened to the Shia/Sunni split? The enemy of my enemy wasn’t as reliable in Iraq. More impulsive behavior?
It's still there and the Houthis are Shias supported by Iran, opposed by the Saudis. Hamas being supported by Iran (despite being Sunni themselves) is closer to an exception. In the Lebanese civil war the Iran-supported Shi'ites of Hezbollah had initially opposed the largely Sunni Palestinians who entered Lebanon from Jordan after Black September, but when Israel invaded in response to the latter Hezbollah fought them until they left
It was quite reliable in Iraq! The central government became dominated by the majority Shia, and the Sunnis basically went into revolt (and, eventually, ISIS.) It's quite true that the Shi'ites didn't share *our* agenda either, but that's a separate issue.
ISIS was supported by Syria and Iran. Syria is ruled by Shi'ites, as is Iran. Iran sponsors Hamas, which is Sunni. The Shi'ite-Sunni split has always been greatly exagerrated.
Tim, that's actually incorrect. Iran was opposed to both ISIS/ISIL and the Sunni rebels in Syria. Iran *does* sponsor Hamas, but that gives you an idea of exactly how much expediency works into these things. The rebels in Iraq, which eventually led to ISIS/ISIL, were opposed to the central government which we helped to stand up and which was dominated by the previously downtrodden Shi'ites (who had pretty close ties to Iran's Shi'ite regime.) Iran also supported the Ba'athist Syrian regime despite having held Saddam's Ba'athist Iraq as a mortal enemy, precisely because they saw the rebels as either Sunni supremacists or as the pawns of Sunni supremacists.
I'm sure this looks confusing, but it's really more of a "war of all against all" situation where everyone was looking for what they saw as their best deal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_and_the_Islamic_State
You are confused. ISIS was created by Assad & Putin:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/assad-henchman-heres-how-we-built-isis
This is a standard modus operandi for Russia & its allies, going back to Dzerzhinsky's "Trust" operation in the 1920s, if not back to the Tsarist secret police. In Russian, it's called "provokatsiya," a.k.a., "controlled opposition" or "reflexive control." Russia and its allies keep doing this, and Western dupes keep falling for it, at least once a decade since.
ISIS was anti-FSA, just like Assad, Putin, Iran, and Hezbollah, who allied together against the FSA.
Also instructive: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/the-syrian-crisis-simplified-whos-fighting-whom-and-why
Tim, Are you arguing for a permanent Neocon garrison in Iraq that would eventually lead the blinkered Iraqis to living like good Americans?
That seems a little Maoist.
Why would Saudi Arabia want to re-double its efforts to normalise relations with Israel while witnessing Israel kill tens of thousands of Palestinians?