Part I: “International Relations for Billionaires” is a Death Certificate
Billionaires like David Sacks believe terrible (and terribly wrong) things about international relations. There’s meaning in that.
South African billionaire and Trump ally David Sacks recently shouted out his “most important books” for understanding world politics, and it’s a crazy list:
Sam Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
Graham Allison’s Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?’
John Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
Sacks then added a tweet linking a fourth book for “bonus points,” Pat Buchanan’s A Republic, Not An Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny.
Chat-GPT couldn’t have curated a finer selection of geopolitical slop. And one of the reasons this is worth writing about is that it’s bigger than Sacks.
Billionaire investor Ray Dalio has similarly praised Destined for War. Palantir’s CEO of death and mayhem, Alex Karp, has drawn on both Clash of Civilizations and The Tragedy of Great Power Politics to explain his worldview. And the MAGA intellectuals who are bankrolled by Trump’s oligarchs have rationalized their project in explicitly civilizational terms that hew closely to Clash of Civilizations.1
Sacks, in other words, is part of a billionaire hive mind when it comes to hacking—not understanding—international relations (IR). These ethnonationalist-oligarch synthesists are attracted to the same handful of books, and seem to take them as truth rather than concern themselves with the mountain of critiques they’ve attracted from scholars of all types. No need to attempt a deep reading of the field in which these books are just a tiny, controversial part.
This list of armchair IR knowledge actually speaks volumes about the imagination of these guys and the kind of world they’re making for the rest of us.
So in this post, I want to summarize what these books are about. I’ve read all four and (critically) taught three of the four as an IR scholar. That will setup a few points I want to make in a follow-up post about 1) why this particular body of “knowledge” is so dangerous and 2) what’s really going on when the uber-rich boast about having read pop-drivel.
The Clash of Civilizations
Tell me you’re a racist without telling me you’re a racist. Samuel Huntington was a famous neoconservative who disdained the student movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s, was an early advocate for the Vietnam War, and, in his later years, wrote a number of works that were controversial for being heavily racialized.2
In Clash, Huntington predicted—on very little evidence—that ethnic and religious conflict would become the primary reason for war in the post-Cold War world. On one level, this was very much of its time. In the ‘90s, it was quite common to believe that the “natural” state of things was for ethnically organized nations to just be roiled in conflict, and the backdrop for the thesis was precisely the ethnic conflicts raging in the Balkans and in Africa.
On another level, Clash went much further, taking an essentialist (unchanging, blood-and-soil based) view of “the nation,” and positing the world as rough civilizational blocs that he divided as: Western; Latin; Islamic; Chinese; Hindu; “Orthodox”; Japanese; African; and Buddhist. Huntington believed that cultural and religious conflict—frictions between ethno-nations—would supersede economic issues or ideology in the vein of capitalism versus communism.
Clash is the third most-cited book on political science syllabi…but it’s not because scholars think well of the argument. It’s hard to express succinctly how despicable this text is. I was assigned it as an undergrad, in grad school, and during my PhD coursework. Every time, my professors assigned Clash as a cautionary tale: “This is not good political science; here’s how we avoid writing racist screeds; here’s how we methodically deconstruct a garbage text,” etc. Even people who agreed that ethnic conflict was the future of war (again, a popular idea at the time) did not accept Huntington’s particular ethnonationalist take on world politics.
Even though Clash was written for the masses, it’s also political science-brain at its worst. Various factors that cause war are not pitted against each other in real life. Identity-based conflicts are often expressions of economic and ideological conflict. Put differently, to see cultural issues becoming more of a flashpoint in the world does not make ideology or economic explanations of war less salient; culture is a site where other explanations for conflict manifest. A key analytical mistake that Clash makes, therefore, is saying “lots of wars” (dependent variable) caused by ethnic difference (independent variable). How would you establish ethnic difference as the cause of the wars you observe, rather than a correlation or a superficial characteristic? That’s the kind of reasonable question that Clash fails to answer, or even confront.
If you believe the Clash thesis though, there’s not a lot of room for optimism about the human condition. International cooperation might only really be feasible within ethnically homogenous imperial blocs. And you might conclude that the best chance for peace—or something like it—is if you re-segregate populations along ethno-national lines. Perhaps an immigration ban.
It’s important to understand that serious scholars mocked Clash for a generation before it became a biblical text for MAGA intellectuals. Clash is not correct in its analysis…but its analysis is now part of a canon for MAGA ideology.
Destined for War
This is airport-bookstore fare. Graham Allison—a legit political scientist whose name has gravitas in the field for work he did in 1971—renders a catchy but thin concept called “the Thucydides Trap” into a book length argument: When the international system experiences a simultaneously rising power and a declining dominant power, great-power war is more likely than not (by his count, in 12 out of 16 cases).
For the most part, the idea is nonsense. Serious scholars have critiqued it to death for being methodologically flawed, racially blind spotted, and evincing incuriosity about both Chinese politics and the sources of American decline. Even most policymakers find it useful only as a way of expressing that they oppose the fatalism inherent in the Thucydides’ Trap argument.
To see powerful billionaires embrace this as a “must-read” suggests, among other things, intellectual laziness. Are you not familiar with the library of rigorous criticisms of Allison’s underlying idea here? Did you just read the first thing that Amazon suggested to you?
But worse than lazy ignorance, signal-boosting this book seems to be a validation for pessimism—a way of telling others that you’re right to use your billions setting up various exits from human civilization, because the smart money is on apocalyptic war.
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
John Mearsheimer is the IR scholar everyone loves to hate. In the ‘80s, he did some important work in the niche world of defense analysis, following it up in 2001 with this book. Tragedy articulates a peculiar, extremist form of realism known appropriately as offensive realism.
It’s one of the more famous texts in international relations, but largely because so many scholars use it as a foil. Mearsheimer caricatures the world in the worst way, giving his theory powerful (but also stunningly incorrect) predictive power. That deep level of simplicity and flat-out wrongness makes it attractive for scholars who wish to differentiate what they’re doing from his reductive point of view.
Tragedy argues that:
States seek survival above all else (did that really need to be said?);
State (military) power is the only thing that can ensure state survival;
The international system is anarchical;
You can never trust the intentions of other states; and
States will always therefore seek to maximize their power relative to other states.
You don’t have to think very hard to realize that most of lived-in, real-world international relations looks nothing like offensive realism. Even interstate competition is an infrequent part of geopolitics. But if you accept these propositions, you can only conclude that insecurity, predation, and recurring great-power war are permanent, tragic features of political life.
If your analysis is that cataclysmic war and domination are eternal, guess what that does to your prescriptions for how to act in the world?
A Republic, Not An Empire
This book is the most pernicious of the bunch, but I can appreciate why it would be batched together with the others.
I read this Pat Buchanan-ifesto during Trump 1.0, and it drove me crazy because it holds out elements of sanity (imperial overextension, the US should be a republic not an empire, liberal internationalism is adventurism, etc). But in the main, the book is low-key racist, and jam-packed with bad analysis and indefensible assumptions. That makes it such a perfect template for Trump’s foreign policy preferences. When people compare Trump to Buchanan, there’s a kind of vanilla-neutral quality to the claim, but here’s what Buchanan says in this book, written in 1999:
Bilateral trade deficits are a national security threat in part because they strengthen China
The Vietnam War was a necessary war (!)
The US should’ve stayed out of World War I and II
The US should pull troops out of Japan and Korea
The US should not defend Taiwan (at the time of writing that wasn’t a serious consideration)
Withdrawal from compliance with the UN generally, but especially the International Criminal Court and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea
Withdrawal from NATO
Shutdown immigration to restore America to first-world status
As a totality, this is Trumpian as hell. And as with Trump, there are elements here that are worth taking seriously for reasons that have nothing to do with Buchanan’s aim of a white nationalist polity.
World War I was a bad inter-imperialist war and the US shouldn’t have gotten involved. Troops in Japan and Korea shouldn’t be there forever, and it’s worth thinking more critically about the relationship between instability and forward presence. NATO expansion was regrettable.
But that’s all “A broken clock is right twice a day” stuff. Civilizational reasoning, legitimating past land grabs and conquests (he thought US settler-colonial expansion was very defensible), not opposing Hitler (!), rejecting international institutions of any kind…come on. And had Buchanan become president, it’s reasonable to assume he’d be imposing something like Trump’s economy-melting tariff regime alongside a war on brown people with tattoos.
I grew up around people with Buchananite politics. To see a key MAGA billionaire (Sacks) shout it out is as predictable as it is a source of dread for its implications.
This post was getting long and I don’t want my analysis to get lost in my summary critiques of these readings. Part II to follow shortly!