Richard Hanania’s new Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy is an eye-opening contrarian take on the academic discipline of  “international relations.”  It is a self-conscious critique of the so-called “realist” view that countries maximize their long-run national interest.  In the next three posts, I’ll share some highlights.

The central argument:

[T]his book argues that both primacy and liberal internationalism are labels put on a collection of policies that are not primar...