Power Problems

Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute, discusses America’s new regime of high protective tariffs under the Trump and Biden administrations and assesses what may be to come on trade policy under a future Trump or Harris administration. He discusses the overly expansive authorities presidents have to impose tariffs, the weakness of commonly employed national security justifications for them, and the economics of why tariffs fail, among other topics.Show NotesClark Packard and Scott Lincicome, "Presidential Tariff Powers and the Need for Reform," Cato Institute Briefing Paper No. 179, October 9, 2024Scott Lincicome, "Six-Plus Years of Incoherent, Ineffective China Policy," The Dispatch, October 2, 2024 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alex Yu-Ting Lin, Assistant Director and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s International Security Center, explains how China’s concerns about status interact with smaller regional states and how that in turn helps shape the US-China rivalry. He examines how states use information warfare to delegitimize adversaries’ foreign policies and applies his analysis to US-China relations. He also discusses Euro-centric bias in international relations studies, China’s approach to flashpoints like the South China Sea and Taiwan, and whether China should be considered “revisionist,” among other topics. Show NotesAlex Yu-Ting Lin, "Contestation from Below: Status and Revisionism in Hierarchy," International Studies Quarterly, Volume 68, Issue 3 (2024).Alex “Yu-Ting Lin, “US Bias in the Study of Asian Security: Using Europe to Ignore Asia," Journal of Global Security Studies, Volume 4, Issue 3 (2019): 393-401. (with David C. Kang) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dov Levin, Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Hong Kong, examines the effects of whataboutism - essentially, charges of U.S. hypocrisy - on Americans’ foreign policy views. He explains his survey experiments to test the effectiveness of whatbaoutism on US public opinion and how it might shape policy. He also discusses his work on U.S. foreign election interference, the academic literature on hypocrisy costs, U.S. foreign policy activism, and avenues for future research on whataboutism.Show NotesWilfred Chow and Dov Levin, “The Diplomacy of Whataboutism and US Foreign Policy Attitudes,” International Organization Volume 78, Issue 1, Winter 2024, pp. 103-133. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Peter Harris critiques America’s grand strategy of primacy and advocates for a move to restraint that necessarily includes wholesale reforms to domestic as well as foreign policy. He explains why primacy has persisted despite the wisdom of retrenchment and how decades of an expansive foreign policy has shaped American politics, culture, and institutions. He also discusses the problems of vested interests, partisanship, and how to make restraint more salable to the public.Show NotesPeter Harris, Why America Can’t Retrench (and How it Might), Polity Press, 2024. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.