Chapter 15: Foreign Policy

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So I want you to picture Grand Forks, North Dakota.

It's 2021.

And the mayor there, Brandon Bochenski, announces this thing that looks like just a massive win for the local economy.

Right.

A huge investment.

Exactly.

It's this Chinese company called the Fufeng Group, and they want to build a $700 million factory to mill local corn into food additives.

Which is, I mean, that's textbook economic boom material right there.

Oh, absolutely.

You're talking hundreds of construction jobs, production jobs, just injecting all this money straight into the community.

And for the local farmers, it's a dream because their transportation costs just plummet, right?

The buyer is suddenly in their own backyard.

Yeah.

For a Midwestern town looking to grow, that kind of direct foreign investment is basically the holy grail.

But there was a massive catch hiding in the geography of this whole deal.

The location.

Right.

The location.

Yeah.

Because Grand Forks is also home to a U .S.

Air Force base.

Yes.

And we're not talking about just some standard, you know, run of the mill airfield.

No, it's highly specialized.

Very.

This base specializes in advanced military drone technology.

It houses this highly sensitive global military communication center.

And this proposed Chinese -owned factory was slated to be built just 12 miles away from that installation.

Which, I mean, 12 miles basically next door when you're talking about the reach of modern global espionage.

Well, completely.

But the crazy thing is, initially, the federal government's response was surprisingly muted.

Like the federal committee that normally reviews these foreign investments looked at the deal and basically concluded that this specific land purchase fell completely outside their legal jurisdiction.

Yeah.

They essentially gave it a bureaucratic green light to break ground.

Right.

But the Air Force saw the situation completely differently.

Yeah.

They were not happy.

They started circulating this internal memo basically describing the factory not just as an agricultural business, but as this potential piece of a much larger strategic pattern.

Like a front.

Exactly.

Where Chinese espionage campaigns essentially hide their operations inside these local economic development projects.

Yeah.

So fast forward to January 2023, and the Air Force makes this official public declaration.

They didn't hold back.

Not at all.

They stated definitively that the factory was a, quote, significant threat to national security.

And days later, bowing to all that pressure, the Grand Forks City Council just completely killed the project.

Boom.

The economic boom just vanished overnight.

Just like that.

And, you know, that snowy town in North Dakota perfectly captures the core puzzle of U .S.

foreign policy, which is actually our mission for today's Deep Dive.

We're getting into chapter 15 of We the People.

Because foreign policy isn't just diplomats in tailored suits signing distant treaties in Geneva.

Right.

Or abstract U .N.

resolutions.

Exactly.

It's this constantly shifting, incredibly complicated tradeoff between global competition and local impacts.

So today we are going to tear apart how American foreign policy is actually designed.

Who wields the real power behind the scenes, the specific instruments they use, and why the whole idea of the United States speaking with one voice on the world stage is practically a myth.

It really is a myth.

And to understand how a single corn mill gets caught in the crosshairs of global geopolitics, we really have to look at the three overlapping engines that drive all U .S.

foreign policy.

OK, let's lay those out.

So we have security, economic prosperity, and humanitarian ideals.

And when they align, great, this is to move smoothly.

But when they collide.

Which is basically constantly.

Yeah, almost constantly.

That's where you get this intense political friction.

So security is obviously the prime directive, right?

We have to keep the country safe.

Absolutely.

But how we define what makes the country secure has, you know, shapeshifted drastically over the centuries.

Right.

If you rewind to the early days of the Republic, like the seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundreds, the blueprint was strict isolationism.

I mean, George Washington's famous 1796 farewell address explicitly warned the nation against forming permanent foreign alliances.

Just stay out of it.

Exactly.

And then the 1823 Monroe Doctrine drew this hard line telling European powers to stay completely out of the It was just geography.

The oceans.

Right.

The Atlantic and Pacific oceans acted as these massive natural physical barriers.

In an era of wooden sailing ships, crossing an ocean to wage war was just a logistical nightmare.

But that moat disappeared right in the 20th century.

Yeah.

Technology advanced.

You had long range bombers, aircraft carriers.

Oceans were no longer these foolproof barriers, which became tragically clear when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.

That morning basically ended American isolationism for good.

It did.

And after World War II, the U .S.

found itself staring down this new heavily armed rival in the Soviet Union.

Yeah.

So the security strategy had to evolve from ignoring the world into what we call containment and deterrence.

OK, let's unpack this for a second, because isolationism is basically like pulling up the drawbridge, locking your castle doors and just completely ignoring the chaos in the surrounding neighborhood.

Right.

But deterrence is entirely different.

Deterrence is like standing on the castle wall, armed to the teeth, making sure your rival sees you.

You aren't actively attacking them, but you're forcing the other guy to calculate the horrific cost of stepping on your lawn.

That's a perfect way to put it.

But the problem with standing on the wall with your weapons visible is that you have to be fully prepared to actually use them.

Right.

It's not a bluff.

Exactly.

So during the Cold War, that required building up these massive arsenals of nuclear weapons.

It created this psychological standoff known as mutually assured destruction.

Yes, MED.

The logic was terrifying, but it worked.

Neither side launches an attack because they know they'll be instantly annihilated in the counterstrike.

And that held the line for decades until the world changed again on September 11th, 2001.

Because 9 -11 fundamentally broke that deterrence model.

Completely broke it.

Suddenly the threat wasn't a massive nation state with a capital city that you could point nuclear missiles at.

It was a secretive network of individuals.

Yeah.

What we classify as non -state actors,

terrorist groups, hostile ideological organizations, and deterrence is utterly useless against an entity that is willing to die and has no national infrastructure to hold hostage.

So what was the pivot?

The George W.

Bush administration pivoted to what became known as the Bush Doctrine.

The underlying logic shifted to preventive war.

Meaning we strike first.

Exactly.

The U .S.

decided it could no longer wait to absorb a first strike.

It would aggressively strike first to dismantle threats before they could fully materialize on American soil.

And today, that security landscape isn't even purely physical anymore, is it?

It's heavily digital.

Oh, cyberspace is this massive, invisible front line.

Right, like the U .S.

government actively banning certain Russian antivirus programs and strongly discouraging the use of Chinese software across federal agencies.

The underlying fear is cyberespionage.

That foreign code could quietly siphon sensitive data.

Yeah.

Which brings us right back to that factory in North Dakota.

It was a physical building, but the military's real fear was its potential as a digital listening post to intercept drone communications.

Which makes total sense.

Yeah.

Now, funding this constantly evolving security apparatus obviously requires staggering amounts of capital.

To put it mildly.

Right.

And there's this chart in the text, figure 15 .1, that tracks U .S.

defense spending over time.

And the trajectory is pretty revealing.

You see this noticeable dip in the 1990s.

The so -called peace dividend after the Cold War ended.

Yeah, exactly.

But then post 9 -11, the chart shows defense spending spiking by like 70 percent over just a decade.

And the climb just continues.

By 2023, which was heavily accelerated by military support for the war in Ukraine, U .S.

defense spending hit roughly 891 billion dollars.

Yeah, we are dropping nearly a trillion dollars on defense just to lock down the perimeter.

But a secure perimeter doesn't mean much if the economy inside is collapsing.

No, it doesn't.

Which is where the second engine, economic prosperity, comes in.

And it's completely intertwined with the rest of the globe.

I mean, the sheer scale of the money moving across U .S.

borders dictates these foreign policy decisions.

We import about three trillion dollars in goods and services and we export another three trillion.

It's massive.

We're looking at roughly 41 million American jobs that directly or indirectly rely on international trade.

So that intense reliance kind of forces the U .S.

to the negotiating table, right, to build and maintain these global trade architectures.

Exactly, like the World Trade Organization, the WTO.

It also drives regional treaties like the USMCA, the United States -Mexico -Canada Agreement.

Which replaced NAFTA.

Right, to update rules for things like digital trade and labor protections.

And the perpetual goal of these agreements is to tear down foreign trade barriers so American goods can flow outward.

But, you know, opening doors goes both ways.

Meaning domestic markets get flooded with foreign goods.

Yes, which creates intense domestic friction.

We see this friction really clearly in how different presidential administrations handle the massive trade imbalances with China.

The text points out that both the Trump administration and the Biden administration aggressively utilize tariffs.

Which are essentially taxes slapped on imported goods.

Right, to counter what they view as unfair Chinese competition.

And despite coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum, both administrations maintained a lot of these restrictions.

The mechanism here is just using federal taxes to artificially raise the price of foreign goods, right, to protect American manufacturing from being hollowed out by cheaper overseas labor.

Exactly.

So we have security driven by survival.

We have prosperity driven by wealth.

Both are fundamentally self -interested motives.

But the US also pours billions of dollars into global health initiatives, disaster relief, and promoting democracy in countries where we really have minimal trade and zero strategic military interest.

Which raises a really crucial question.

If American foreign policy is so aggressively driven by keeping our borders safe and our humanitarian ideals.

Well, it functions as the ultimate form of soft power.

Promoting human rights and helping the less fortunate builds global goodwill and alliances without ever having to fire a weapon.

Okay, so it's strategic compassion.

You could say that.

The US will publicly condemn anti -democratic actions like the 2021 military coup in Myanmar to clearly signal its values to the world.

But, and this is a big but, those values have a hard pragmatic limit when they slam into the first two goals.

Meaning we won't let human rights concerns override vital national security interests.

Precisely.

That is the underlying reason the US maintains deeply entrenched alliances with non -democratic regimes like Saudi Arabia.

Having a stable, well -armed partner in a volatile, oil -rich region basically trumps the push for democratic reform.

The text illustrates this tension perfectly with this funeral called America Side by Side.

It highlights two bar charts comparing foreign aid.

And the data presents this fascinating paradox depending on how you read the numbers.

Oh, I love this example.

Right.

Because if you look at the first chart showing total dollars spent, the US looks like the ultimate global philanthropist.

We contribute around 60 billion dollars in foreign aid.

Germany is second at 36 billion.

So we look incredibly generous.

But if you look at it like a household budget, measuring aid as a percentage of gross national income, our overall wealth, we are basically the billionaire dropping a single penny in the tip jar.

We give about 0 .2 % of our GNI.

Meanwhile, a country like Germany gives 0 .85%.

It drastically changes the perception of how much of our national wealth we're actually willing to sacrifice for humanitarian goals.

So when these goals conflict, when human rights clash with cheap oil, or when a local economic boom clashes with a military drone base, someone has to make the final call.

And it's really easy to assume that in a democracy, the voters are ultimately pulling the levers.

But they really aren't.

When you look closely at the mechanics of foreign policy, it is arguably the most elite dominated space in American politics.

And sitting at the absolute center of that elite structure is the president.

But wait, hold on.

Didn't the framers of the Constitution explicitly give Congress the power to declare war and ratify treaties?

They did, yes.

So how is a president legally bypassing that to, for example, launch a unilateral special ops raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, a mission where Congress basically found out by watching the news at the same time as the rest of the country?

It comes down to centuries of stretching constitutional loopholes.

The framers made the president the commander in chief of the armed forces.

And modern presidents argue the commanding troops gives them the inherent authority to initiate military actions to protect national interests instantly.

Without waiting for a politically gridlocked Congress to formally declare war.

Exactly.

And when it comes to treaties, the executive branch found an even bigger workaround,

the executive agreement.

Yeah, the scale of this loophole is absolutely staggering.

An executive agreement is basically a deal hammered out directly between the president and another nation.

It carries the exact same legal weight as a treaty, but it completely cuts the Senate out of the approval process.

Because the Senate requires a two thirds super majority to ratify a treaty, which is nearly impossible in a hyper partisan era.

So presidents just bypassed them.

Since 1947, the US has entered into over 17 ,000 agreements with foreign nations,

17 ,000, and only 6 % of those were ever submitted to the Senate as formal treaties.

By relying on executive agreements, the president functionally rewrites the rulebook on international diplomacy.

And the inner circle helping the president execute this global vision is historically a very exclusive, very homogenous club.

Yeah, there's a bar graph tracking the demographics of foreign service employees from 1987 to 2020.

Over those three decades, the diplomatic core grew from roughly 9 ,000 employees to over 13 ,700.

The proportion of women increased from 24 % to 37%.

Which is progress.

It is, but racially, the establishment has barely budged.

In 1987, the service was about 75 % white.

By 2020, it had only shifted to about 69%.

So the individuals actively crafting and executing our global strategies represent a fairly narrow slice of the American population.

True.

And supporting that elite diplomatic group is an absolute sprawling bureaucracy.

At the top, you have the National Security Council, the NSC.

How does that fit in?

Think of the NSC as the ultimate filter.

Raw, chaotic, often contradictory information is pouring in from around the globe every single minute.

The NSC digests that chaos and distills it into actionable policy options for the president.

And a massive portion of that raw data comes from the intelligence community.

Which is not just one office.

No, it's a web of 18 different agencies.

Right.

You have the CIA handling overseas human intelligence and covert ops like piloting armed drones.

You have the NSA conducting massive electronic surveillance and code breaking.

And it is rarely a harmonious team effort, is it?

Not at all.

The post -9 -11 creation of a new role, the Director of National Intelligence, or DNI, proves exactly how fractured these agencies can be.

How so?

Well, the 9 -11 Commission revealed a fatal flaw in the system.

The CIA and the Department of Defense were essentially operating as rival fiefdoms.

They had entirely different operational cultures.

They were competing fiercely for federal budget dollars.

And worst of all, they were hoarding vital intelligence instead of sharing it.

Ah, so Congress created the DNI specifically to force these agencies to play nice.

Exactly.

Demanding they coordinate to produce a single, unified daily intelligence summary for the president.

But you can't just legislate away decades of institutional turf wars.

The text notes these agencies still fiercely protect their independence.

They frequently try to maneuver around the DNI, briefing congressional committees directly, or keeping the DNI in the dark about specific operational sources whenever they can.

Yeah, the executive branch is navigating all of this internal chaos constantly.

And Congress, despite losing significant ground on war powers and treaties, still holds the ultimate trump card to force their will.

The power of the purse.

Exactly.

They write the checks.

That president can announce a grand global initiative on television all they want.

But if Congress refuses to allot the funding, it is just an empty speech.

Congressional committees wield enormous influence over where that money goes through items and earmarks.

Take the House and Senate Armed Services committees.

They are so closely tied to the military apparatus and massive defense contractors that in 2022, they actively tried to force an additional $37 billion into the military budget that the president hadn't even requested.

It's wild.

And circling outside the formal government entirely are interest groups pushing constantly to shape policy.

Like who?

You have Cuban Americans leveraging significant voting blocks in key states to maintain strict economic sanctions against the regime in Cuba.

You have environmental groups organizing massive public pressure campaigns and lobbying efforts regarding international commitments like the Paris Agreement on climate change.

It's an incredibly crowded room of voices trying to whisper in the president's ear.

It really is.

So we have this massive bureaucratic machine influenced by Congress and interest groups led by a powerful president, all trying to balance security, economy, and human rights.

What actual levers do they pull to make things happen out in the world?

Well, they have a toolkit ranging from handshakes to missiles.

The foundational everyday tool is diplomacy.

Ambassadors and foreign service officers spread across the globe, gathering ground -level intelligence, negotiating quiet deals, and building the relationships that resolve conflicts before they escalate into crises.

Then you have international institutions like the United Nations.

Right, the UN, which doesn't have a massive standing army to force a nation to comply with its demands.

No, it doesn't.

But it serves as an unparalleled platform for shaping world opinion and organizing international peacekeeping missions.

It provides a stamp of international legitimacy.

And there's also a lesser -known tool in the text that acts as a fascinating middle ground between diplomacy and force.

Arbitration.

Arbitration is essentially outsourcing conflict resolution.

Instead of two nations resorting to punishing economic sanctions or military threats over a dispute, they mutually agree to let a neutral third party hear the case and make a binding decision.

Like the U .S.

taking Italy to the International Court of Justice over an American -owned manufacturing plant that local Italian authorities had essentially confiscated decades earlier.

Right, it's a mechanism to resolve bitter disputes purely through legal frameworks, preserving the broader diplomatic relationship.

But when diplomacy stalls and arbitration isn't an option, leaders reach for the most visible, most expensive, and most lethal tool in the box.

Military force.

Yeah, and the U .S.

alone accounts for roughly one -third of the entire globe's military spending.

The Prussian military strategist, Karl von Clausewitz, famously called war politics by other means.

He wasn't separating military action from politics.

No, he was arguing that military force is simply a brutal, coercive policy lever deployed when talking fails to achieve the state's goals.

And the application of that lever is incredibly complex.

We often conceptualize military force solely as destroying an enemy state's army, but it is frequently deployed as the only viable way to enforce humanitarian ideals.

That's a really important point.

Look at 2014 and 2015 in Iraq.

ISIS militants were committing genocide against the Yazidi people, trapping tens of thousands of refugees on a mountain.

Diplomacy wasn't going to stop the slaughter.

International military force was the absolute prerequisite.

The military had to secure the airspace and the ground through airstrikes before any humanitarian food or medical aid could even reach the refugees.

It's true.

But deploying the military is universally considered the option of last resort in the foreign policy playbook.

The text emphasizes this for two glaring reasons.

First, the human toll and lives lost and the financial burn rate are astronomical.

Second, the political blowback for a democratic government is immense if things go wrong.

Yeah, the American public's tolerance for military action is notoriously short.

Very short.

A quick, decisive victory will temporarily skyrocket a president's domestic approval ratings.

But when a conflict drags into a war of attrition with climbing casualties, hundreds of billions in sunk costs, and no clear exit strategy,

public support evaporates rapidly.

The wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq serve as stark historical warnings of how a protracted foreign conflict transforms into a massive domestic political nightmare for the administration that launched it.

Absolutely.

You know, hearing all of this, the 18 competing intelligence agencies, the congressional budget fights, the influence of local lobbying groups, it really shatters the way we usually consume news about foreign affairs.

It completely dismantles what political scientists refer to as the myth of the unitary actor.

In daily news coverage, you constantly hear phrasing like, the United States demanded X or America decided Y.

Right.

We talk about the nation as if it's a single organism with one brain, a single set of clear desires moving in one unified direction.

But the reality is that the United States is a plural actor.

It is less like a single rational brain and more like a massive chaotic corporate board meeting where the departments are screaming at each other.

I love that analogy.

The sales department, focused on trade, wants one thing.

The security department, the military, demands another.

And HR, pushing humanitarian goals, is just trying to get a word in edgewise.

Yes.

And that internal clash dictates every move we make globally.

Look closely at trade policy.

If you are a factory worker in Ohio facing layoffs because of cheap imported steel, your primary interest is sheer survival.

You demand the government impose strict tariffs to protect your job.

But if you are a massive multinational corporation headquartered in New York, tariffs destroy your global profit margins.

You demand free trade to move goods cheaply across borders.

Both are deeply held American interests, but they are entirely incompatible.

Exactly.

And you see these fractures running straight through partisan politics, too.

Like the Republican Party historically prioritizing, maximizing defense spending and protecting domestic industries from foreign competition.

While the Democratic Party frequently pushes to divert some of that massive defense budget, into domestic social programs, and often aligns with groups favoring freer global trade.

You even see it in ethnic attachments, where diverse American communities lobby fiercely to swing U .S.

policy in favor of their ancestral home countries.

It's pulling the government in dozens of different directions simultaneously.

The ultimate lesson here is that foreign policy is never entirely foreign.

Every global decision sends shockwaves back into domestic politics, creating winners and losers in local communities across the country.

Which brings us right back to the snow in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

The fight over that corn mill was never just a local zoning dispute.

It was the reality of a plural actor unfolding in real time.

Exactly.

You had a mayor and local farmers desperate for the economic prosperity of a $700 million factory.

You had an Air Force base hyper -focused on national security and the invisible front lines of cyber espionage.

And you had a federal government caught in the middle of navigating a massive shifting global rivalry.

All of those fractured domestic interests, violently colliding in a single town.

It forces us to confront a fundamental question about how our entire system operates.

If every foreign policy decision is ultimately driven by these fractured domestic interests, if the gears of global strategy are constantly jammed by local economic needs battling national security fears,

can a deeply divided America ever truly speak with one voice when the next global crisis hits?

That is a phenomenal question.

It's the exact question to carry with you as you watch the news this week.

Thank you for joining us for this session on the intricate machinery of U .S.

government.

Keep asking questions, keep looking past the headlines to see the mechanisms underneath.

And on behalf of the Last Minute Lecture team, thanks for taking the deep dive.