Red in Tooth and Claw

is to start by talking about political philosophy and the tradition of political philosophy that I come out of, which is the analytic tradition of political philosophy, the liberal tradition in a broad sense.

And in that tradition of political philosophy, international competition is seen almost as kind of like an accident or a sideshow.

The fundamental questions of politics are all domestic.

You can see this in the social contract tradition, starting from Hobbes or Locke, various other writers, who basically see the fundamental questions of political philosophy the relation between humans and their cats, or excuse me, as the relation between governments and their people.

And you can see this even today, or in much, you know, in latter day political philosophy, in authors like Rawls, where he has this enormous book, A Theory of Justice, that is about, well, let's imagine society is a cooperative venture, but also kind of an island interaction with other societies.

He says, well, you know, I guess that's interesting or something.

I'll cover that in our later work.

You know, the margins of this extremely long book are too small to contain the law of peoples.

He does eventually get back to the law of peoples, but like no one reads it because it kind of doesn't matter.

Point is, That's, I think, a mistake.

It's a way of seeing the world that might be natural, I think, especially for English and American authors, as so many of the authors in the social contract in the liberal tradition are, because Britain and the United States have historically had pretty strange geopolitical positions.

Britain is quite famously an island that is hard to get to.

The United States is not an island, but it almost might as well be.

We've been separated from the affairs of the world by these enormous oceans.

We have two neighbors that are largely peaceful.

We are an enormous country by land mass, by population, by economy.

So it's kind of easy for us to imagine like America is what matters and like stuff outside the borders.

Well, we talk about that later.

Of course, your perspective on this question of international competition is going to be much different if you are a small state in Eastern Europe or even a large state like Ukraine.

What I want to propose here is that rather than seeing international competition as kind of an accident, as something like, oh, you know, it's happening now, but like, you know, in normal politics, international competition doesn't matter.

I want to say international competition is actually, should be central to how we understand the problems of politics.

Because if you look at human history, international competition has been central to every society in human history as far back as we can see.

Maybe there's one or two exceptions out there, but far and away, most human societies have always lived among other human societies in which they are in contact.

And sometimes that contact is friendly and productive, and sometimes that contact is competitive or destructive or imperialist.

sometimes both at the same time.