Welcome to the Un-Diplomatic universe...
Un-Diplomatic is a project committed to thinking through a foreign policy that opposes oligarchs, militarists, and other scumbags who have undue influence over our dystopian world politics. I'm ultimately interested in peace, but getting there requires taking issues of power seriously.
To put it plainly, power-political, "great game" bullshit is by and for elites at the expense of workers. The price that working-class folks pay for rich-man geopolitics ranges from being the victims of upward wealth redistribution to being funneled into wars of questionable merit to serve as cannon fodder. Most foreign policy analysis has a giant blind spot when it comes to the "common man" and I'd like that to change.
The newsletter is also meant to be a complement to my show, The Un-Diplomatic Podcast, which has a similar vibe. From time to time, I'll use the newsletter to expound on show notes and such. And a paid subscription to this newsletter is the primary way to support the pod.
I have a personal site where you can get a deeper sense of my background if that's your thing. I was a career national security technocrat and "defense intellectual" before becoming a scholar. But during the Trump years, I had a number of experiences (and minor epiphanies) that added up to a transformation of how I think about security and geopolitics; I gradually became one of the national security state's more vocal critics as a consequence. Current Affairs magazine described me as "a dissident among foreign policy intellectuals." Not wrong.
If you subscribe to this newsletter, you'll get emails delivering new posts, guest posts, podcast summaries, etc. And if you upgrade to a paid subscription, you’ll get patron-only podcasts, access to the full archive of posts, the ability to start chat threads and comment on posts, and—most of all—you’ll get the patron-only newsletter posts, which I release several times per week.
If you want to syndicate or republish anything that appears on this site, just hit me up with a request. ✌️
--Van Jackson
