Recently I spent some time redecorating my office to create room such that there was space for me to work that was physically apart from my computer, because I’ve come to view the internet as a huge time sink.
Apparently this endeavor of mine has failed miserably, however, because here I am blogging about something I saw on Bloggingheads TV:
In the clip above, Heather Hurlburt and Daniel Drezner discuss arguments that involve posing tradeoffs between domestic spending and foreign policy spending. Drezner sketches out an argument he ties to Obama’s Afghanistan speech: we’re in a big hole at home and we just can’t afford running around throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into places like Afghanistan and Iraq, so part of what we’re trying to do is cash out of those endeavors and keep the money we could spend there at home instead. Hurlburt describes this as part of the argument Cato’s foreign policy team–Chris Preble in particular–has been making, but that says that this approach is “not going to happen because it would seem like a public admission that there are constraints on what we can do, even though we would agree that there are massive constraints on what we can do.”
Hurlburt goes on to say that “our economy can’t recover unless the global economy recovers” and that “a big part of how quickly and in what directions our economy recovers” has to do with the U.S.-China relationship and the development of green jobs. Therefore, the “classic isolationist trope” of what Drezner described–doing less abroad so we can do more at home–doesn’t work.
I’m completely lost here. (If the kind people at BH.tv would invite me on, I could explain in vivid and expressive detail!)