The vegetable versus the fascist? The Democratic Party is in chaos. Why AOC and the Squad back Biden (for now). Biden's Trumpian turn. The truth about Biden's foreign policy record.
An emergency live episode of the Un-Diplomatic podcast. Van explains the situation the Democratic Party faces: who will replace Biden, why it's likely Kamala Harris, why Bernie should be her running mate, and what all that means for foreign policy. Livestream on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSc9-8Qra5w&t=842s Un-Diplomatic Newsletter: https://www.un-diplomatic.com...
Navigating the politics of Washington think tanks. Matt's interview with The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner. Robert O'Brien wants the entire Marine Corps to relocate to Asia. Arundhati Roy is a target of Modi's Hindu-fascist turn. The case for defunding ICBMs. And Chiquita Banana death squads. Un-Diplomatic Newsletter on the politics of think tanking: https://www.un-diplomatic.com/p/a-political-map-of-washington-think Eliana Johns on ICBMs: https://inkstickmedia.com/faith-as-small-as-a-titan-relyin...
“One man’s deterrence is another man’s escalation.” Van spoke at an event rolling out a recent report, What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Escalation. At the event and in the report, Van laid out a logic of peacemaking, relating the strategic, the political, and the nuclear all together. Listen further if you want to know why peace requires movement from Warming Actions-->Ripening Actions-->Reciprocal Transformations. Or if you want to know what the politics of Gaza ...
Van, Julia, and Matt discuss how to think about Biden's Gaza ceasefire deal. Why "peace through strength" is a chauvinist meme. A.I. is a violent grift that hasn't changed war. Mexico's election of Claudia Sheinbaum highlights a potential contradiction between industrial policy and geopolitics. Thinking about the meaning of D-Day in light of militarism today. William Hartung and Michael Brenes on A.I. and the War Industry: https://michaelbrenes.substack.com/p/better-defense-through-technology Ja...
Van made an appearance on the Squaring the Circle podcast, a military-facing show that got into his origins in the national security state. The discussion talks about the importance of a working-class perspective in foreign policy, what was really wrong with Obama’s pivot to Asia, why Van is critical of “great-power competition,” and a number of other issues. Subscribe to the Un-Diplomatic Newsletter: https://www.un-diplomatic.com Squaring the Circle: https://shows.acast.com/squaring-the-circle/...
This re-released conversation with Daniel Immerwahr is one of our all-time top ten episodes, initially released on December 30, 2022. In Part II of Van's sit-down w/ Professor Daniel Immerwahr (author of How to Hide an Empire), they talk about Daniel's recent chapter about the politics and ideology of George Lucas's Star Wars. Was the Galactic Republic really an empire the entire time? What made Star Wars a Vietnam movie? What's the deal with the Ewok? And what's wrong with Lucas's version of an...
This re-released conversation with Daniel Immerwahr is one of our all-time top ten episodes, initially released on December 28, 2022. Why do geopoliticians blow off climate change and environmental degradation? Is geography really an insurmountable force? What do "geopolitical risk consultants" really do? And what should we make of the fact that geopolitics has its origins in imperialism? What did Nazis, in particular, see appealing in geopolitics? Van sits down w/ Professor Daniel Immerwahr (au...
Out of the maybe 20 live events I spoke at in the US recently, only one—one!—was actually recorded and you’re about to hear it. About this Event: From the War on Terror to the militarization of the Pacific, and from imperial competition with China to US support for Israeli atrocities in Palestine, the US quest for primacy has devastating consequences globally, and a corrosive impact domestically. Join us for a free flowing conversation about the consequences of endless wars and militarism, rethi...
Why is “debt-trap diplomacy” nothing more than an anti-China meme? Why is the geopolitical interpretation of Chinese overseas lending wrong, and what does that suggest about US/Western estimates of China’s intentions? Why do Chinese firms hate writing down unpayable debts? And why do smaller developing nations rarely benefit from international financial competition? I sat down with the great Shahar Hameiri to discuss all that and more in the latest episode of the pod. Subscribe to the Un-Diploma...
This interview with the Review of Democracy podcast is the deepest dive to date on Van Jackson’s book, Grand Strategies of the Left: The Foreign Policy of Progressive Worldmaking. Subscribe to the Un-Diplomatic Newsletter Review of Democracy Podcast...
What does Guam’s political status say about US strategic thought? What strategic choices does Guam have if it were allowed self-determination? What does America’s imperial relations with Guam have in common with the rest of the Non-Sovereign Pacific? And why does the existence of a Non-Sovereign Pacific region make both the Pacific and the great powers less secure? I assure you, you’ve never heard a foreign policy conversation like this. A hilarious, personal, and highly edifying conversation at...
This episode is unusual, more like part of a mini-lecture series. I was asked to give a talk recently on inequality, development, and IR theory for an audience that skews quite young. I’ve chopped it up to just bring out the highlights, but we hit many topics that might be of interest: —Why IR paradigms are not especially useful for making sense of inequality. —Why it sucks to be poor, no matter what flag you live under. —Capitalism v. Marxism, and by proxy, modernization theory v. dependency th...
What’s wrong with liberal internationalism? What alternatives do socialists and progressives offer? Is voting more (or less) than a defensive tactic? Is the Democratic Party beyond redemption? Is China a force for good or evil in the world? Van went on the 1 of 200 podcast to have a really real debate about everything on the left’s mind at the moment. They talk about his new book--Grand Strategies of the Left--but couch it in a larger conversation on left perspectives about foreign policy. 1 of ...
How do the space-colony visions of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos meaningfully differ? What does a company like Space-X have in common with the old imperial company-states, like the British East India Company? And why are billionaire bros obsessed with “political exit” projects like seasteading and galactic escapism? We tackle all that and more with Alina Utrata, a scholar whose new article in American Political Science Review called, “ Engineering Territory: Space and Colonies in Silicon Valley ” is ...
What separates conservatives from reactionaries, and where do they converge? What are the politics inherent to counterinsurgency strategy? What does the popularity of counter-insurgency in the 21st century say about Democratic Party politics? How does small-war thinking unify counter-revolutionary monarchies with Edwardian imperialism with anti-communism? And where does David Petraeus fit into these questions? All that and more in this wide-ranging conversation with Joseph Mackay, anchored in hi...
What made Daniel Ellsberg—the famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower—different from today’s public intellectuals? How has the think tank environment in Washington changed over the decades? Why were the Pentagon Papers such a big deal? Why is foreign policy change so difficult? And how does progressive foreign policy fit into the story of Washington’s intellectual stagnation? I sat down with Matthew Petti to discuss a new essay he had on the life of Daniel Ellsberg, the death of the old-style think ...
After George Floyd’s police murder and the Black Lives Matter movement explosion in 2020, the field of international relations rushed to engage the topic of race after ignoring it for half a century. When they did, they largely acted as if early generations of international-relations scholars hadn’t engaged with or theorized the topic. But they had. In this episode, Van sits down with Robbie Shilliam, a multidisciplinary IR scholar and postcolonial theorist, to talk about: What made Hans Morgent...
In this episode, Van sits down with Adom Getachew to talk about W.E.B. Du Bois’s life and Du Bois-ian thought as a prism for making sense of the world, including: The global color line and its limits for understanding IR; Du Bois’s complicated attitude toward violence versus pacifism; strategies for trying to make change as a public intellectual; how he viewed World War I, and how that view changed with time; his blind spots on gender equality and empire—especially imperial Japan; how Du Bois vi...
Have you ever wondered about the political economy of movie-making? Like, why are Hollywood movies globally hegemonic, and why is South Korea its only rival, and why are most foreign countries mere backlots for American studios? What does it have to do with the Netflix-Hulu-Amazon-Disney+ streaming model? Why are the WGA and SAG-AFTRA on strike? What kind of solidarities unite American writers and actors with Korean writers and actors? And what is the future of film? Some really big questions, a...
I just gave a talk to a section of the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs—a great group of a couple dozen Gen Z’ers, at a nice little bar in Wellington. What started out as shooting the shit about foreign policy turned into a live show of the podcast. In this live show, I put three propositions on the table—Un-Diplomatic regulars will be at least somewhat familiar with all these themes: 1) Sino-US rivalry is not a struggle for hegemony or domination; 2) US grand strategy is one of pr...
This episode doesn’t just have a theme, it has a thesis. Have you wondered how precisely the Pentagon manages to siphon so much taxpayer money year after year? How the military-industrial-congressional complex functions in practice? Why US primacy is so expensive yet perpetually in crisis? This episode with William Hartung and Julia Gledhill is something of a tutorial for understanding Pentagon bloat and corruption—which are deeply intertwined. US defense strategy has been hot garbage for, well,...
In this cross-over episode with the Security Dilemma podcast, Van speaks with Patrick Fox and John Allen Gay of the John Quincy Adams Society about a range of issues: dissident thinking and intellectual diversity in foreign policy; how to think about China and deterrence; what’s wrong with a "foreign policy for the middle class”; fissures in the progressive movement on foreign policy; and more! Subscribe to the Un-Diplomatic Newsletter: https://www.un-diplomatic.com Subscribe to the Security Dil...
Part II of my conversation with Jonathan Kirshner about his new book, An Unwritten Future: Realism, Uncertainty, and World Politics . Kirshner explains how classical realists think about the “national interest"; distinctions between realist and progressive political economy; what he doesn’t like about the “Thucydides’ Trap,”; the poverty of offensive realism; and how classical realism understands everything from British appeasement of Hitler to the Vietnam War. Subscribe to the Un-Diplomatic New...
Part I of my two-part conversation with Jonathan Kirshner about his new book, An Unwritten Future: Realism, Uncertainty, and World Politics . Kirshner explains why classical realism is a misunderstood intellectual tradition. We get into: Why realism recruits dead people into their intellectual tradition; what we can learn from Thucydides, and why an armchair understanding of the Peloponnesian War does more harm than good; why realist pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy; why international rel...
What's the difference between centered and de-centered international orders? How do small states navigate geopolitics without becoming pawns? What does it look like to have a world in which there is no hegemon, and how is it sustained? And why was 15th century maritime Southeast Asia a different international order than the Sino-centric "tributary system" in what is now Northeast Asia? Dr. Manjeet Pardesi joins the show to share new research that sheds light on all these questions and more. A to...
What's wrong with liberal hegemony? What does it mean for New Zealand to have an "independent foreign policy?" Why did New Zealand's Prime Minister recently visit China? And why are the interests of New Zealand's leading dairy supplier far from the same thing as the interests of the nation? In this cross-over episode, Van sits down with the good folks at the 1 of 200 Podcast to discuss an unusual intersection of US foreign policy pathologies with those of New Zealand. Subscribe to the newsletter...
Van sat down with China watcher Carla Freeman (US Institute of Peace) to explore this thing Xi Jinping announced last year called the “Global Security Initiative,” which turned into a larger discussion about how China thinks about security and international order generally. The catalyst was a piece she wrote with Alex Stephenson. We get into: What China’s “relational” thinking about world politics really means in practice; How Chinese security thinking affects the global South; How US choices af...
Opposition parties carried the day in Thailand's recent multiparty elections on May 14. The Move Forward Party, led by Pita Limjaroenrat, and Phue Thai party of Thaksin Shinawatra's family, won a sizeable majority, with the military's coalition parties losing resoundly. What does the recent election mean for the country's path forward? Will the military's election commission let the opposition form a government, or will it stage another coup like in 2014? Has Thai society finally moved on from t...
What does it mean to write with not just logos but pathos? How has racial violence in America shaped the identity of Asian-Americans? Why is the "model minority" myth so problematic? And what possibilities emerge from recognizing that people of different nationalities share a common repression? Van speaks with Gaiutra Bahadur about her experience growing up around anti-Indian racism in New Jersey and how that sheds light on all these questions and more. Gauitra's essay, "Unmaking Asian Exception...
