Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Iran and Threats to U.S. Security 8/11/2008
What this covers
Russ Roberts interviews Bruce Bueno de Mesquita in a 2008 conversation that pivots between two distinct territories: contemporary threats to U.S. security and the machinery of political victory. The first half addresses Iran, where Bueno de Mesquita argues the threat is overstated—that Ahmadinejad wields less power than commonly assumed and that Iran's calculus around nuclear weapons reflects rational cost-benefit analysis rather than existential hostility. The second half, and the weightier portion, applies Bueno de Mesquita's theory of heresthetic campaigning to explain how major geopolitical outcomes emerge not from grand strategy but from domestic political maneuvering.
Bueno de Mesquita distinguishes between two campaign types: rhetorical competitors who battle over existing issues, and heresthetic innovators who redefine which issues matter at all. He argues that major foreign-policy shifts—including the Cold War's end—often arise as byproducts of self-interested domestic politics, not deliberate vision. Reagan's military-spending strategy and Yeltsin's "autonomous Russia" coalition are presented as the twin, necessary conditions for Soviet collapse; yet Yeltsin, he contends, pursued this maneuver for personal political survival, not to end the Cold War. The conversation ranges across negative campaigning's psychology (exploiting loss aversion), the Reagan coalition's construction (linking fiscal and social conservatives), why primary systems push parties toward extremes, and why skilled heresthetic candidates box opponents into impossible positions. Notably, the discussion treats candidate behavior as constrained by voter preferences and the structure of the moment rather than driven by personal ideology—a framing that applies whether examining Reagan's 1980 strategy against Carter or how Gorbachev's reform bid backfired.
Bueno de Mesquita argues that winning candidates like Reagan and Yeltsin succeed not by competing within existing issues but by 'heresthetics'—strategically redefining the political landscape to build coalitions opponents cannot match—and that major foreign-policy outcomes (including the end of the Cold War) often emerge as byproducts of self-interested domestic campaign maneuvering rather than grand strategy.
- There are two campaign types: rhetorical (competing to be better on existing issues) and heresthetic (innovating to redefine which issues matter).
- Reagan's win-the-Cold-War-through-military-spending strategy and Yeltsin's 'autonomous Russia' coalition were necessary-and-sufficient conditions for the Soviet collapse.
- Yeltsin pursued the Russian idea for personal political gain, not from a vision of ending the Cold War.
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Negative campaigning capitalizes on loss aversion (Kahneman and Tversky's finding, originating from minimax regret and prospect theory) whereby people are more concerned about avoiding losses than achieving equivalent gains—so the negative campaign creates fear that voting for the opponent means losing something one already has.
“they observed that people were more concerned about avoiding losses than they were about gain... and so the negative campaign capitalizes on that it is you it is to create fear you have something and if you vote for this other guy you're going to lose it”
The breakup of the Soviet Union and Gorbachev's defeat were a byproduct of Yeltsin's self-interested political innovation to create a Russian entity he could run—Yeltsin did not envision or aim for the Cold War's end or even the USSR's collapse, but his maneuvering changed how the world worked.
“he changed the fundamental way that the world worked as a byproduct of his political maneuvering simply to be a more powerful guy than he otherwise would have been”
Heresthetic campaigners like Reagan and Yeltsin won despite being far from the median voter not by hiding their positions but by linking issues to redefine the political space along multiple dimensions—where being far from the status quo paradoxically makes it easier to assemble a winning coalition than being close to it.
“if you can link issues strategically then you can create a space where there can be a coalition where before that space didn't exist”
Yeltsin resurrected his career by linking his anti-privileges campaign to an 'autonomous Russia' argument—that Russia produced most of the Soviet Union's wealth while subsidizing the other republics and uniquely lacked its own Communist Party—which Gorbachev could not embrace without becoming the head of an empty shell, while it appealed to Russian nomenklatura who would gain money and power.
“he resurrected himself by having a profound insight of how he could link his ante privileges campaign to another campaign autonomous Russia in such a way that he could win over the very people who were keeping him out of power isolate Gorbachev”
Negative campaigning persists because it works; its logic was already articulated ~2000 years ago in the campaign brochure Quintus Tullius wrote for Cicero, advising him to tell each audience what it wants to hear regardless of truth and to cast doubt on opponents by alleging their depravity and corruption.
“the reason negative campaigning exists is because it works... his brother Quintus Julius helped him out... laying out the the strategy... wherever you go be sure to say what you believe the audience wants to hear it doesn't have to be true”
When voters claim to want 'principled' politicians, what they actually want is politicians who agree with them—evidenced by Bush and Cheney being genuinely principled men on Iraq whom most people dislike precisely because they disagree with those principles, while a beloved figure like Reagan was praised after death for principles many of his eulogizers had hated and pressured him to abandon while alive.
“we say we want principled politicians what that really means is we want politicians who agree with us”
William Riker reinvented the study of politics as the originator of the serious mathematical and game-theoretic study of politics; in 'Liberalism Against Populism' he explains that the best we can hope for from democracy is a system that makes it easy to throw the rascals out.
“he is the originator of the serious mathematical study of politics particularly through game theory”
Before the early 1970s, primaries were not decisive; in 1968 roughly six party 'barons' (Strom Thurmond, Everett Dirksen, Barry Goldwater, John Tower, etc.) controlled about 40% of Republican delegates, so Nixon won by securing these insiders while Romney, Rockefeller, and Reagan's grassroots efforts were doomed.
“there were what we refer to in the book as a set of barons in the Republican Party Strom Thurmond Everett Dirksen Barry Goldwater John towers so forth this handful of people about six of them controlled something on the order of 40 percent of the delegates”
The rhetorical vs. heresthetic distinction maps onto two types of economic competition: rhetorical campaigning is competing within the existing market by making a marginally cheaper or better product, while heresthetic campaigning is Schumpeterian creative destruction—the innovator who creates a new market rather than tweaking the old one.
“the rhetorical campaigner is competing in the existing market not not redefining the market... and the hair esthetical campaigner is is the innovator who is really creating a new market”
Successful incumbent firms are often blindsided not by rivals doing the same thing slightly better but by entrants doing something radically different—illustrated by the slide-rule maker Keuffel & Esser, whose 1967 hundred-year forecast missed the pocket calculator that destroyed it within five years.
“in 1967 - SR allegedly... commissioned a study of the future a hundred years from now... one of things they didn't come up with though that was five years away not a hundred years away it was the pocket calculator which... destroyed cofilin s-sir as a going concern”
It is extremely difficult to wrest a party's nomination from a sitting president of one's own party who can run again—the last incumbent to actively seek and fail to get his party's renomination was Franklin Pierce—illustrating the power of incumbency and name recognition (the 'devil you know').
“The last time that a presidential incumbent sought the nomination of his party and for re-election and actively sought it and failed to get it was the great Franklin Pierce”
The Reagan military-spending strategy was necessary but not sufficient to bring down the Soviets; it required the simultaneous presence of someone like Yeltsin providing an alternative anchor via the Russian idea—the confluence of both was both necessary and sufficient, and without Yeltsin the Soviets would have muddled through.
“the Reagan strategy was necessary it wasn't sufficient he had also to have somebody like Yeltsin... so it was the confluence of those two things I think that was both necessary and sufficient to bring down the Soviets”
There are two basic kinds of campaigners: rhetorical campaigners who try to persuade voters they will solve the agreed-upon problems of the day better than rivals, and heresthetic campaigners who instead redefine what the correct problems are and position themselves as the only candidate who understands them, thereby constructing a coalition no other candidate can assemble.
“there are two basic kinds of campaigners there are campaigners who engage in rhetoric that is they try to persuade voters... and then there are candidates that we describe as Harris that ish ins a word invented by William Riker”
Campaigns persuade by exploiting inherent uncertainty: the 'devil you know' (incumbent record) is portrayed as doing terrible things, while the challenger remains an unknown, so negative campaigning makes voters fear that staying the course risks disaster.
“you better worry that other guy is really dangerous you don't know what I'm going to do because I'm not in office so I'm the devil you don't know but that's better than the W the W dunno because that guy is doing really terrible things”
Reagan articulated in a 1963 memo that the United States could win the Cold War peacefully by spending so much on the military that the inefficient Soviet system would be forced to choose between bankrupting itself to compete or giving up—a vision he held long before SDI was publicly attributed to Edward Teller around 1983-84.
“Ronald Reagan set out in 1963 in a memo... that the United States could win the Cold War peacefully by spending so much money on the military that the inefficient Soviet system would be compelled to choose between bankrupting the country to compete on the military dimension or giving up the ghost”
Reagan likely did not know whether SDI was technically feasible (knowing little physics) but understood that spending heavily on it would function as a 'costly signal' in game-theory terms to the Soviets that the U.S. knew how to build it, compelling them to either invest in matching it or resolve the underlying issues.
“he seems to have thought that if we spend a lot of money on it this will be a signal and game theory terms a costly signal to the Soviets that we know how to do it in which case they would be compelled to try to either invest in it or find a way to resolve the the issues”
Candidates who run on clear principle without expectation or capacity to win, like Norman Thomas, can profoundly influence history without holding office—Thomas's socialist platform (Social Security, ACLU, equal rights) became the basis for the New Deal and Great Society even though he was relegated to a historical footnote.
“if we look at some of the major policy innovations of the last several decades in the United States the New Deal... the Great Society... the programs that these folks were implementing were the ideas of Norman Thomas”
Reagan was primarily a libertarian in his own outlook, but in 1977 he identified that two types of conservatives existed—fiscal conservatives (already Republican, pro-big-business) and socially conservative blue-collar Democrats who disliked big business—and built a socially conservative coalition that captured labor and Catholic votes, becoming the bedrock of the modern Republican Party.
“the insight that he had in 1977 was that there were two types of conservatives in the United States and the Republicans were only getting votes from one of those two types... he carved out a niche for them in the Republican Party and he took the labor vote”
The primary system, by bringing out low-turnout activist voters with the strongest views, now forces candidates toward the extremes to win the nomination and back to the center to win the general election, making both parties more monolithic and internally differentiated than in the era of liberal Republicans and hawkish Democrats.
“to win the nomination you have to run towards the extremes rather than the center and to win the presidency of course you have to run to the center”
Gorbachev pursued reform not from idealism but as a miscalculated bid to consolidate power: modest economic reform plus dangling foreign-policy concessions (greater détente) to attract Western economic assistance, which backfired by strengthening Yeltsin's hand, turning the international community into a constraint, and alienating the conservative wing—producing exactly the opposite of consolidation.
“Gorbachev attempted to reforms that he thought would solidify his hold on power... willing to dangle concessions on foreign policy greater day taunt in exchange for foreign economic assistance”
Fundamental changes in foreign policy arise as a consequence of voters' choices of leaders, even though those foreign-policy outcomes played no part in the candidate's strategic rise to office—so treating foreign policy as deliberate grand strategy is a fundamental mistake, and there may be little continuity from one leader to the next.
“so when we talk about foreign policy as grand strategy this is a fundamental mistake because foreign policy is the consequence of politician was campaigned often on completely different things and there may be very little continuity from one leader to the next”
A skilled heresthetic campaigner constructs a coalition around arguments such that the main opponent cannot embrace the position without admitting their record was a mistake, nor oppose it without isolating themselves by losing key constituencies—as with Reagan boxing in Carter in 1980 between defending his presidency and alienating the scoop Jackson Democrats.
“they construct a coalition around a set of arguments such that their main opponent in Reagan's case in 1980 for example Jimmy Carter could not embrace his position without acknowledging that the four years of his presidency were a mistake and couldn't oppose the position without isolating himself by losing key members of his constituency like the scoop Jackson Democrats”
Because voters reward agreement, candidates have an incentive not to be clear about positions—they 'tell the whole truth to nobody,' shading their words to each audience (telling the truth but not the whole truth) rather than flatly contradicting themselves, because the whole truth will not get you elected.
“they tell the whole truth they don't know both but not the whole truth right because the whole truth will not get you elected and that's what campaigning is about it is about winning”
Reagan in his 1968 campaign ran a 'southern strategy' that appealed through code words to racists (though he was not himself a racist) because he needed that constituency.
“in 1968 Reagan ran on a strategy that one would have to describe as a southern strategy that had the characteristic of appealing through code words too many racists... he was not a racist but that was a constituency he needed”
Voters should evaluate candidates by the quality of mind they display when confronted with an unanticipated question—whether they quickly retreat to the Quintus Tullius tactic of denouncing opponents and reciting the stump speech, or actually think and respond substantively to the unexpected query.
“what people should look for is the quality of the mind when a candidate is confronted with an unanticipated question how do they handle the response how quickly do they slide back to the quintus Tullius advice”
In a heresthetic campaign the negative component is more 'positive' in form: rather than arguing the opponent cannot solve problems, it argues the opponent is focused on the wrong problems—looking under the lit lamppost where nothing is happening while the real issues lie elsewhere.
“it is not arguing this other guy doesn't know how to do things but rather... he's talking about the wrong stuff... that guy's gonna look under the lamppost where it's all lit up brightly... but there's nothing happening under that light bulb it's happening someplace else”
Reagan campaigned on cutting taxes to stimulate economic growth that would raise government revenue, with the increased revenue used to greatly expand the military and force the Soviets into an unwinnable choice—citing Kennedy and Harding as prior successful tax-cut precedents against Bush's 'voodoo economics' charge.
“the central themes of reagan's campaign were that we had to cut taxes in order to stimulate growth in the economy and that by stimulating growth in the economy government revenue would go up not down the increase in revenue could to a significant degree be used to greatly expand the US military”
The 2008 campaign will be a rare contest where foreign policy (Iraq, war on terror) dominates and the domestic economy plays a small part, and no current candidate is a heresthetic innovator—they are all rhetorical campaigners offering vague assertions rather than concrete reasoned arguments, and candidates will become vaguer as the election approaches because clear positions lose.
“this will be one of those rare campaigns where the domestic economy will play a very small part... I see nobody among the current crop of candidates whom I would describe as hair aesthetic these are all rhetorical campaigners”
Politicians can influence history without ever holding office.
“you could influence you can influence history without being present obviously”
Campaigns are a very expensive and not very entertaining form of activity, yet people pay attention because a lot of money is spent on them.
“it's a very expensive form of entertainment and it's not that entertaining”