I’d started working on a novel during Trump 1.0 called The Good Liberal. The story followed the despair of an idealistic but politically naive teacher confronting the rise of authoritarianism at home in the stupidest way possible.

As the institutions he reveres buckle, civic norms erode, state repression escalates, and the greatness of American democracy proves to be a sham, our protagonist reaches what he feels to be an inescapable conclusion: the leading politicians of the opposition party are a cancer that must be removed to restore the republic of his imagination. I never finished writing the book,1 but the crescendo was supposed to involve the protagonist crashing out and going on an American Psycho-esque assassination spree. A tragicomic parable about the perils of failing to develop class consciousness.

The idea at the core of the book sprang from countless conversations I’d had in 2017 with #NeverTrump liberals. The righteous rage toward Trump that the lanyard class—mortgage-having, culturally bourgeois, well-intentioned white-collar workers—harbored at that time rarely spilled out into full public view except in the odd Twitter screed. But over weekend brunches and happy-hour conversations, what these people expressed in private felt emotionally volatile; an aneurysm at the flagrant betrayal of their preferred image of America.

I commiserated for sure but was wired differently.

I loathed Trump, just like them, and vocally so! But I came of age understanding the United States as a place with a dark origin story, uneven rights, and a rigged economic system. I spent most of my professional life suppressing that knowledge while climbing the foreign policy ladder and into academia. So when Trump became a political reality, I understood him not as an anomaly but rather a symptom of structural problems—the price paid for Americans (and me) ignoring what I once knew to be true about the country.

But that view clashed with many of the “good liberal” elites I had befriended in Washington.2 As far as they were concerned, Trump was a boil to be lanced on an otherwise great nation. No deeper reckoning necessary.

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I’ve since tended to think that, as the democracy myth decays, good liberals who refuse class consciousness would fracture in one of two directions: Become the thing they hate and support fascists, or else crash out as they reckon with the discovery that reality is far from what they’d always believed. It’s the latter camp that seemed ripe for lone-wolf political violence.

Why? Because liberalism is capacious, but one of its defining features for most of my life has been its unfamiliarity with the grammar of solidarity, mutual aid, or comradely worldmaking; a highly individualized, even lonely, way of existing that interpolates political action through nothing more than voting, opinion-having, and a personal relationship to state institutions. If the state betrays your fealty and crushes your belief system while you remain closed off to alternative ways of making sense of the world (eg, the class-based analyses of left-wing thought), your habit of processing reality through a lens of personal action and personal responsibility could go in some twisted directions.

This is why I thought that, other than military veterans, “good liberals” with the wrong mix of personal circumstances were among the most at-risk of taking “justice” into their own hands. The mere idea that justice is something you can realize through vigilantism wreaked of liberal desperation.

My vocation requires me to think, talk, and write about “political violence” a lot, but I never fully developed this theory of the good-liberal assassin. I only bring it up now because it seems to be becoming more salient: Trump’s war on “the left” has so far been primarily a war on the lanyard class—the class with the greatest concentration of “good liberals.”3 They are under assault, symbolically and materially.

Enter that Cole Allen guy, a name practically lifted from the pages of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. A Bluesky obsessive. A critic of pro-Palestinian protestors. A never-Trumper. A Noah Smith fan. A left-puncher and Hasan Piker hater. A one-time Act Blue donor. This is like every person who lives in Washington, DC! Put differently, the guy who tried to shoot up the White House Correspondents Dinner had all the markers of a “good liberal.” A bland fanatic who mistook the problem as one of lancing a boil.

It reminds me of the Nihilists. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, there had been a movement of nihilists in Tsarist Russia who committed a wave of assassinations. Revolutionaries in sentiment, but ideologically incoherent and lacking class consciousness, a theory of power, or even much of a plan. They were not a power bloc; they were desperate and isolated individuals. They were who Trotsky had in mind when he famously mocked terrorists as “liberals with bombs” in 1938.

We don’t know why precisely this Cole Allen guy crashed out, but he has thrown away his life with a single ineffectual act of self-indulgent lone-wolf nonsense. Noah Smith fans might be shocked, but Trotsky would have been unsurprised.

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Pity the American farmer.

A new report has US farm bankruptcies increasing from 216 in 2024 to 315 in 2025. The Midwest alone—the breadbasket of American agriculture—saw a 70% rise in bankruptcies.

We must understand this plight as a policy choice. The farm sector of the economy is a victim of the imperial presidency and the national security state. The permanent war economy crowds out the agricultural economy.

Farmers are not facing a decline in demand for foodstuffs. They are facing rising costs of inputs to production (fuel, fertilizer, labor, transportation, and insurance) combined with greater exposure to natural hazards due to the climate crisis. American militarism is at the heart of their crisis in multiple ways.

First, Trump’s tariff regime was a pathology of the imperial presidency. Only a super-empowered executive branch could claim “national security” as a blanket justification to impose tariffs on the world. This imposed foreign retaliatory tariffs on America’s agricultural exporters, but it also raises the costs of imported materials for farming like fertilizer.

And Trump’s national security vision has been squeezing the farmer in other ways. The supposed immigration emergency at the heart of MAGA’s ethnonationalist global vision did not just entail the deployment of a secret police and the military to American cities. It cashed out as visa restrictions on farm workers, which affected labor supply.

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There’s more. The Trump administration also paired reduced farm subsidies with corporate favoritism toward ideologically reactionary regimes in Latin America at the expense of American producers. The most egregious example is crypto-libertarian Javier Milei’s regime in Argentina, which received a $40 billion aid plan from the US in 2025 and signed an agreement to increase beef exports to the US by 400% just two months ago.

And because 80% of the discretionary budget now consists of national security spending ($1.5 trillion!), guns literally crowds out room for butter. In defending Iran-War spending, the corresponding $1.5 trillion military budget, and the dramatic reduction to welfare and healthcare spending he’s proposing, Trump said:

It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things…We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care.

He didn’t mention agriculture but he’s extending that same tradeoff reasoning in cutting farm subsidies. Trump did announce $12 billion in aid to US farmers hurt by tariffs in 2025, but he hasn’t renewed that call; the amount was not proportional to costs; and aid does not compensate for lost markets at any rate.

Finally, the Iran war—an illegal, dehumanizing, war of choice that would not be happening if the US were not a declining empire still pursuing global primacy—is creating a food and fuel crisis. The costs of both oil and fertilizer are increasing as a result of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz combined with damage to oil refining and transportation infrastructure. Farm foreclosures in 2027 will unquestionably be higher than they were last year.

To be clear, US agriculture was struggling before Trump. 216 farm bankruptcies in Biden’s final year in office is a lot. The inflation resulting from the Ukraine war similarly hit the American farmer hard. And dollar primacy—which is valued primarily by the national security state for the sanctioning power it provides and the financing of US military buildups it facilitates—keeps the US dollar strong relative to foreign currencies, which has always depressed the value of US agricultural exports.

But like many problems, Trump is not the origin of them; he is the accelerant of them. Unless you want to live in a fascist state, you cannot have a sprawling permanent war economy and a resilient agricultural sector. The former carries too many opportunity costs that might have benefited the latter.

At least the strain on farmers is going to be great for private equity. Bankruptcies mean distressed assets, and distressed assets get swallowed whole by vulture capitalists who strip, consolidate, and extract from the carcass of collapsed businesses. Nobody else matters. The end.

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Instagram’s algorithm has been pushing me a strange kind of video combining a critique of the Iran War with Nipsey Hussle, one of my favorite rappers. Here’s an example video:

I found myself getting sucked in. They put the video to a Nipsey song in the background, “Last Time That I Checc’d,” a high-energy celebration of the independent hustle. The guy in the video calls Nipsey “the honorable martyr.” He then speaks in a vernacular that hits people like me a certain type of way:

Not many know that he’s representing the culture of resistance and martyrdom. We the Iranian people are in the middle of war with the United States and Israel. And we gather here tonight to show you that we have way more in common than you think. One god, one blood, and one enemy. Peace!

The call to solidarity. The celebration of a beloved hip-hop figure. Acknowledging the US state’s repression of its black and poor. The assertion that the Iranian people have much in common with the American people. All of this rings true to me in a way that I find appealing. And I wasn’t alone. I could see that many people I know—including celebrities and athletes who are not especially political—were liking and sharing the viral video.

But something about it sat uneasily with me. After watching it a few more times, I identified three specific things. One was the reference to the Iranian people being at war with the US and Israel. It’s not wrong, but it’s an interstate war that happens to slaughter civilians; the invocation of “the people” erased the distinction between the state and its people. If there was no separation between the state and the people, then why did the Iranian state have to violently put down mass protests in January?

Then I recalled that, contra the video’s claim, Nipsey Hussle was not a martyr. Nipsey did become a low-key Black Nationalist in the last decade of his life, but he never talked about or visited Iran; he was largely ignorant of geopolitics (I’ve read his biography). More importantly, Nip got murdered by a jealous nobody in 2019, outside a Crenshaw clothing store he owned. The state was Nipsey’s opposition throughout his life, but it did not murder him. He did not die for a particular cause, nor at the hands of a shared enemy. The video, therefore, was inaccurately manipulating Nipsey’s fans’ desire to have his death mean something greater than mere human tragedy.

The most problematic statement came at the end—“one god, one blood, and one enemy.” One enemy? I quickly realized this was meant to arouse and exploit Black American—and hip-hop lovers’—hostility to the US government and its war on Iran. It placed the current war in a long line of American crimes against humanity (some legal, some not). The video was tapping into a historical perspective that Malcolm X and the Black Panthers had also championed, which helps explain why the Malcom X Foundation was posting multiple of these Iranian hip-hop propaganda videos.

Here was the problem: The video appealed to the darker aspects of American history to recruit oppressed Americans to side with the Iranian people, which the videos conflate with the reactionary Iranian government.

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What is Campism?

The slick packaging belied what the social media content was selling: Campism, pro-Iranian-regime propaganda. Campism—which reduces socialist politics to supporting a specific geopolitical “camp”—has existed since the Bolshevik Revolution as a peculiar brand of self-proclaimed anti-imperialism.1 During World War II, campists were self-identified socialists who refused an international socialist “Third Camp” in favor of the Soviet imperialist or capitalist imperialist camps.

When the Soviet Union violently suppressed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, campists became synonymous with “tankies,” those who rationalized or supported Soviet violence. In recent decades, “campist,” which remains an analytical category, has doubled as an epithet for anyone who sides with any enemy of Western capitalism or imperialism—thus, a pro-Chinese, pro-North Korean, or pro-Iranian socialist who sides with these states against Western empire gets labeled a campist. It’s a complicated label, but one we need to retain because it describes a tendency within international left circles that has always been there but appears to be getting more common.

The slipperiness of our moment is troubling. The West really is crashing out and engaging in rampant imperialism, and any people on the receiving end of military aggression have a right of self-defense—including Iran. And as outsiders to a conflict, we don’t really have the moral standing to say how a people being attacked should or should not defend themselves.

And yet! All of that can be true at the same time that the state defending itself from Western attack makes choices that put its people in dangerous geopolitical positions or denies its people basic rights, which can range from the means of subsistence to free speech to non-arbitrary arrests and disappearances.

Campism is a zero-sum moral absolutism—“one enemy!”—that depends on analytical oversimplification. People gravitate to a campist position because they want to feel that there’s an agent out in the world exercising power on their behalf. And in a world of national states, the state form still represents the greatest territorial concentrations of power in the world.

The Problem With Campism

I want to be delicate because I understand the impulse from which the campist view arises and I agree with a chunk of its analysis. But it’s too simplifying, too narcissistic—a Third-World equivalent of vulgar Marxism that subordinates any liberatory ideal to a state-based counter-hegemonic power struggle against Western imperialism. The campist lines up with the state that’s doing the fighting, because it’s the most fertile concentration of force against empire.

In the Iran context, the campist wants to label any leftist who might criticize Iran’s theocratic, reactionary regime2 as doing a liberal’s “bothsidesism,” policing public opinion on Iran’s behalf.

But Frantz Fanon would’ve had harsh words for campist reasoning. Any close reading of Fanon would refuse the claim that Third World sovereignty is inviolable or beyond critique. Nationhood itself was only meant to be a way station on the path to liberation, and the only way to get to the destination (liberation) was to avoid the myriad reactionary potholes along the way. In fact, most of The Wretched of the Earth was spent decrying what he derisively called the “national bourgeoisie,” the imperialist who looks like the local but who rules in a manner that might as well be the foreign oppressor. Fanon thought national consciousness was “nothing but a crude, empty fragile shell.” He worried about reactionary regimes controlling Third World governments in the name of anti-imperialism.

The truth, that states are amoral vessels for elite power that sacrifice regular people as they clash with other states, is uncomfortable and leaves us searching for refuge in a world of clashing national militaries. But truth is better than lies. States are mechanisms for pushing abstract justifications down and siphoning resources up. The hope of leftist parties and movements is simply that those “resources up” can be used to restore power to the people in a way that makes humanity’s liberation possible.

Yet Another Realism of Fools

We would all be a lot better off if we proceeded with the starting assumption that—with few exceptions—states are bad, because they’re ruled by self-interested elites who share little in common with those they govern. We should then judge states without rose-colored glasses. To what degree does a state immiserate and/or deny the rights of people? That’s the metric that matters. If you find yourself cheering for one state or another—or policing political conversations to avoid having your preferred state condemned—chances are you’ve lost sight of that crucial question.

I have tended to think that the kind of foreign-policy “realism” that prevails in Washington—contra realism in the critical or even classical IR sense—is simply militarism; the realism of fools. It is unrigorous; it subordinates domestic politics to its power-amassing fetish; it has a zero-sum bias; and the power it cares about most is the crudest, camouflage-colored kind. In all these ways, foreign-policy realism—militarism—amounts to nothing but an ideology of military buildups that struggles to avoid the wars such buildups encourage.

Campism espouses a similar type of realism insofar as it sees the one true anti-imperialism as matching force against the force of empire while everything else takes a back seat. That’s pretty cynical, and realism is nothing if not cynical.

But even if a realist recognized the need for someone to check American domination, and even if they thought that was Iran’s function, they would neither cheer nor moralize about it. The campist, by contrast, imposes a moral valence on the exercise of its version of cynical anti-imperialism, which leaves it in a contradictory trap—amoral in its use of power, self-righteous in the morality that justifies its amoral actions. Ends, in other words, justify the means. And that sounds a lot like how the enemy thinks.

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When I worked in Washington, I had the vague impression that J Street was on the side of the good guys. Yes, they worked on behalf of the US alliance with Israel at a time when I was starting to hear murmurs about an apartheid regime on the ground, but they weren’t like AIPAC; they were all Democrats!

Of course, that was a time when there was no “left” to speak of; when Beltway awareness of apartheid against Palestinians was quite low; and when the price of existing in the Washington foreign policy scene was an unflinching fidelity to American exceptionalism and US global primacy.

I bring this up because I’ve never clashed directly with—and never even had much of an opinion about—J Street, which Wikipedia describes as a “liberal Zionist advocacy and lobbying group.” But I’ve noticed that it’s had a tough time doing its job since October 8, 2023. Popular opinion is generally against genocidaires, and it didn’t take long for Israeli bloodletting to turn the world against itself. The latest numbers, in fact, signal just how much the world has changed:

This context of a dramatic sea change in US politics is important for situating the sturm und drang that erupted when J Street announced last week that it supported longstanding popular demands to end US financial support for Israel’s military. The timing of the announcement came only weeks after AOC had stated publicly that she opposed funding for the Israeli military, including for Iron Dome. Democrats have similarly begun recalibrating their stance on Israel. Even the Dems’ leading hawk, Elissa Slotkin, now opposes certain forms of arms transfers to Israel, though she still supports “defensive” weapons sales and subsidies.

But all is not as it seems.

Policy wonks and activists alike need to understand how the terrain has and has not shifted. Nobody in the Zionist camp has called for an end to the Pentagon policy of QME (qualitative military edge) through which the US commits to ensuring Israeli military primacy in the Middle East even as the US also sells advanced weapons to Israel’s Gulf neighbors.1

Whether we can take J Street’s shift as a win for Progress is not especially important. What is important is that Netanyahu himself has publicly stated the need for Israel to ween itself off of Uncle Sugar’s free money, which it does not need. And this is the problem: As long as QME remains in place, shifts in US security policy toward Israel represent changes in how the US supports Israel’s militarism and expansionism, but not the fact of supporting it. What J Street advocates ending—along with centrist Dems—is what’s called “Foreign Military Financing,” but that’s only one of several vehicles for furnishing arms.

It gets worse. The J Street shift comes a year after Israel itself began proposing to US legislators a move away from FMF toward the co-production of weapons—a change in the mode of weapons acquisitions, not a curbing of Israeli armament. The Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project has the receipts:

Likud MK Amit Halevi has been spearheading an effort to transform the US-Israel military relationship to one of “joint projects and investments” rather than FMF–a plan which Israel pitched extensively to the Trump administration and Capitol Hill last year.

…Last March, Heritage published a policy paper entitled “U.S.–Israel Strategy: From Special Relationship to Strategic Partnership, 2029–2047”. Heritage argues for a gradual phasing out of FMF while increasing appropriations for the co-development and co-production of weapons, and Israel’s commitment to purchase increasing amounts of US weapons from its own funds through Foreign Military Sales (FMS). Under Heritage’s model, in total, the annual flow of US weapons to Israel would increase from $3.8 billion to $4.5 billion annually despite FMF appropriations being phased out.

And last December, Bradley Bowman, Senior Director of FDD’s Center on Military and Political Power, published a similar policy paper entitled “Beyond the U.S.-Israel MOU: The Case for a Strategic Partnership Agreement”. Bowman argues that a Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) between the US and Israel should replace the previous MOU model. However, unlike Heritage’s proposal, FDD does not advocate ending FMF appropriations to Israel; instead these would be subsumed in a broader $5 billion annual Partnership Investment Incentive (PII), which, in addition to FMF appropriations would also include–like the Heritage proposal–increased levels of funding for the co-development and co-production of weapons and Israeli purchases of US weapons, presumably through FMS.

While differing over the question of whether to continue FMF appropriations for Israel…both aim to enhance, rather than diminish US-Israeli military coordination and cooperation, and to increase, rather than decrease, weapons flows from the US to Israel.

Since 10/7, I’ve been pretty conflicted over how to think about liberal Zionism, of which J Street is probably the foremost institutional expression. What I can say confidently is this: Any organization or ideology that supports perpetuating a regional power’s military primacy—especially when that power is liable for crimes against humanity—is on the wrong side and needs to get right. A section of US and Israeli elites have a very millenarian death drive; there’s no reason why US taxpayer money should be aiding and abetting it.

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1

As I wrote in Grand Strategies of the Left, ending QME is a consensus demand among advocates for a progressive foreign policy; low-hanging political fruit.

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ICYMI:

Bang-Bang

Exodus (1960) w/ David Meir Grossman | Ep. 26

Otto Preminger’s Exodus isn’t just a sweeping Hollywood epic but a foundational text of the postwar Zionist imagination. Van and Lyle are joined by journalist David Meir Grossman to dissect the 1960 film and its enduring legacy. Together, they parse the film’s aesthetics and ideology, its thinly veiled apologetics for settler colonialism, and its staging of Jewish suffering as license for state power…

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a year ago · Van and Lyle are Bang-Bang

Only a few months ago, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a viral speech about the rupture of global order. It was notable primarily for admitting decades of Western hypocrisy and narrating a shift away from comfortable old Shibboleths about a “rules-based international order”—sweet words that the world’s wealthy bathed in while everyone else gradually ate more shit.

The speech echoed around the world partly because it was coming from Canada, which had been one of the leading shock troops of American hegemony. With a little distance though, we can see now that the speech was cynical; failed to match prescriptions to its diagnosis of how the world had changed; and offered no direction toward anything other than a world in which “middle powers” would be more self-interested.

This week’s speech by Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, at Tsinghua University in Beijing is infinitely more important than Carney’s in both describing the world as it is and charting a course toward peace and away from empire. I’ve seen almost no coverage of the speech in mainstream/Western media but it’s viral within global South media—a pattern that is itself revealing.

I’m including the full transcript below, but it’s worth highlighting just how tightly Sanchez’s remarks mirror ongoing Un-Diplomatic themes: positive-sum statecraft; economic inequality as a chief problem, alongside American militarism; multipolarity as a material reality that strategy must accommodate; and a diagnosis that what we are experiencing is not a hegemonic transition but rather a post-hegemonic world. An excerpt:

There are those who stubbornly cling to interpreting reality in zero-sum terms. To narrating the growth of some as a loss for the rest. Or to arguing that deepening certain relationships implies giving up others. But I believe this interpretation is not only wrong, it’s also dangerous because it is stagnant…what is happening today is not a transfer of hegemonies. It is a multiplication of poles. Not only of power, but also of prosperity. And this is great news for Europe. Because for the first time in contemporary history, progress is germinating simultaneously in many places around the world…

The multipolarity I’m describing isn’t a hypothesis. Nor is it wishful thinking. It’s already a reality. The new reality in which the world lives…And the Spanish government, and Spanish society as a whole, chooses to embrace it. It does so with realism, pragmatism, and, undoubtedly, a sense of responsibility.

…for a multipolar order to function [we need] greater involvement from major and middle powers in the management and provision of what academics call global public goods. These include, for example, combating climate change, security, defence, and fighting inequality.

My only critical comment is that multipolarity is a distribution of power, not a form of political ordering. What’s needed is a vision for political ordering that matches a multipolar moment. That vision is what Sanchez, contra Carney, offers in his speech. He seems to be dubbing it a “multipolar order,” which is fine but might make IR scholars’ heads explode.

If I disagree with anything here tonally, it’s that it’s stubbornly optimistic about a conjuncture whose defining forces are urgently negative.1 Entrenched oligarchy; repressive national security states; an AI bubble waiting to pop; a looming food and fuel crisis; a swelling global precariat; a lawless predatory former hegemon trying to hoard wealth and security at the world’s expense; nuclear war as a very real prospect that nobody has the time or mental clarity to take seriously.

It all gives reason for gloom…until political elites decide to confront them. And I guess that’s reason for optimism: All the darkness is happening within a context of multipolarity, and what we do—as people and governments—can address these manmade problems, if we can begin to think differently about them. There’s at least one prime minister out there who is.

Hey, friend! You might have noticed that I’m offering more of Un-Diplomatic without the paywall; I’m trying to keep as much as possible public. But to do that requires your help because Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported. As we experiment with keeping our content paywall-free, please consider the less than $2 per week it takes to keep this critical analysis going.

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Full text of the remarks by Spain Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, on April 13, 2026.

Respected President and Chancellor of Tsinghua University. Teachers. Students of Tsinghua University. Da jia hao.

It is a true honour to be in this temple of knowledge. A global benchmark for teaching and research. A place where human beings explore the limits of science and our imagination. And where we also find new ways to cooperate and thrive.

Let me begin by talking about precisely that: science and imagination. With a story that took place not far from here, more than four centuries ago.

In 1583, an Italian Jesuit named Matteo Ricci arrived in China. In his meagre luggage, he brought with him some books, an astrolabe, and a world map.

It was a European map. Correct in its proportions, highly advanced in its level of detail, but biased in its perspective. Because what it did was show the world as the West saw it: with Europe at the centre and Asia on its right edge. At the ends of the earth. Upon seeing it, the cartographers of the imperial court asked the Jesuit why China appeared at that extreme end of the map. And the European scholar understood for the first time that the Mediterranean Sea was the centre of his world, but not of others. Every world had its centre, and so Matteo Ricci completely redrew his map. This time, using the Pacific Ocean as its axis and encompassing the entire Eurasian continent within it.

More than 400 years have passed since then, more than 400 years. But unfortunately, there are still people who see the world as it appeared on that first map distorted by Ricci. I say distorted because I know the world wasn’t like that. I know that, in 1583, China was already a great power, representing a quarter of the global population and GDP. That it traded with half the planet. And that it led in science and technology in many fields.

I know this because, as the University President has rightly reminded us, Spain was also a great empire at that time. An empire that traded raw materials and manufactured goods with the Ming Dynasty through the Manila corridor. And that sailed the oceans with magnetic compasses, muskets, and stern rudders. In short, with technologies of Chinese origin.

Spain at that time was aware of China’s greatness. It knew that Beijing was not on the periphery of the world, but one of its centers.

And present-day Spain knows this too. It knows that China is rebuilding its greatness. That it is already the world’s leading exporter of goods and the fourth largest in services. That its industry and science are transforming the fight against global warming and also reducing poverty. And that, as such, China is destined to play a vital role in the future of the world.

That is why, dear president, professors, and teachers, it is a true honor for me to be able to address this centre of thought as a Spaniard and also as a European.

There are those who stubbornly cling to interpreting reality in zero-sum terms. To narrating the growth of some as a loss for the rest. Or to arguing that deepening certain relationships implies giving up others.

But I believe this interpretation is not only wrong, it’s also dangerous because it is stagnant. It makes us prisoners of the past and limits the possibilities the future offers. It makes the mistake of assuming that the world we see, the world of old maps, is the only possible world.

In my opinion, what is happening today is not a transfer of hegemonies. It is a multiplication of poles. Not only of power, but also of prosperity. And this is great news for Europe. Because for the first time in contemporary history, progress is germinating simultaneously in many places around the world. Places, moreover, that are not alike. That do not have the same culture. Nor the same political system or the same social conditions. And that do not need to ask anyone’s permission to grow. This is happening here in China, in Asia. But also on the African continent, and also in a region very close to Spain, such as Latin America.

The multipolarity I’m describing isn’t a hypothesis. Nor is it wishful thinking. It’s already a reality. The new reality in which the world lives. And therefore, we must accept it. We can’t change it. We can only choose between denying it or embracing it.

And the Spanish government, and Spanish society as a whole, chooses to embrace it. It does so with realism, pragmatism, and, undoubtedly, a sense of responsibility. But I would like to emphasize that we also do so with hope. Because we believe that if Spain, Europe, and China were able to prosper together in the past, there is no reason to think that we cannot do so again.

Obviously, it won’t be easy. We know that. There are also issues that divide us. Matters on which we don’t share the same opinion. Issues on which we compete. We also disagree. Points on which we won’t agree. Perhaps we’ll never agree.

But humanity progresses when we build on what unites us, not when we deepen the chasms that divide us. It is in this spirit that we work from Spain with many other countries, such as Brazil, India, South Africa, and Mexico. And, of course, also in our relations with China.

Spain’s proposal, therefore, is clear: to build a relationship based on mutual respect. A respect that allows us, among other things, to cooperate in all possible areas, to compete where necessary, and to manage our differences when they are unavoidable.

And Spain defends this same vision in every corner of the world and in every capital city. It does so in Madrid, our capital. In Brussels, the capital of Europe. And it does so in the rest of the world in the same way.

But for that vision to work, and for the world to prosper under the new multipolar order, we will need to develop three very important things in the coming months and years. Three elements that I would like to share with you all.

The first is that efficient multilateralism is not possible without strengthened multilateralism.

There are those who believe the multilateral system is dead. Unfortunately, we are seeing many cases in the media of crises and wars happening around the world. They think that, indeed, this multilateral world is dead, that it’s a thing of the past. And I want to say here that I profoundly disagree with that analysis. And I do so emphatically.

I believe that global governance instruments worked in the 20th century and are more necessary today than ever before. Rules and cross-border cooperation are the only tools that will allow humanity to overcome the climate emergency and the other challenges of this era.

I believe that a multipolar world needs a robust multilateral system, not to impose a single vision, but to transform the crucible of our perspectives into a strength for all humanity. Not to eliminate our differences, but to address them peacefully and respectfully.

Because multipolarity without rules leads to rivalry, and from rivalry only come wars, trade conflicts, and ruin.

That is why we in Spain are calling for a profound renewal of the multilateral architecture. It must be made more efficient, more transparent, more accountable, and also more inclusive and pluralistic.

Because if multilateralism is to remain useful, it must change and better reflect the balance of power and the sensitivities of today’s world. We cannot allow the past to stifle the future of multilateral organisations.

That is why I think the West should relinquish some of its representation quotas in favour of global stability and the confidence of countries in the south.

That is why I think we must transform the United Nations as soon as possible with a much stronger General Assembly, a more representative Security Council, and a more democratic decision-making system in which all regions truly have a voice and a vote, and middle powers can also play a unifying and harmonising role, which is what is expected of them.

And we in Spain also think it would be good if, for the first time in history, a woman led the United Nations Secretary-General.

The second point I would like to share with you all is that this new multipolar order must work, and it must do so with balanced and reciprocal trade relations. We cannot simply move from the imbalances of the 20th century to a different one in the 21st century.

And for that development to be stable, sustainable, and healthy, the multipolar order will need a more horizontal and fairer economy, in which there are no losing regions and winning regions, but truly global supply chains that create employment and wealth in all latitudes of the planet and share negative externalities proportionately.

Why do I say this? Because the European Union is doing its part. Whether it’s doing so quickly or slowly, and with difficulties, I certainly acknowledge that, is debatable, but it is doing its part.

In the last decade alone, we have signed trade agreements with 25 countries. We have increased our imports from the so-called Global South by 80% and created more than 25 million jobs annually outside our borders.

We need China to do the same. To open up so that Europe doesn’t have to close itself off. To help us correct the current trade deficit we have with them.

A deficit that is not balanced, that grew again by 18% last year alone, and that is unsustainable for our societies in the medium and long term. It is unsustainable because of the isolationist movements it fuels and the social grievances and suffering it causes. To give you an idea, our trade deficit with China now accounts for 74% of our country’s total deficit.

Therefore, I believe it is important that we correct this, cooperate, and jointly build a balanced, globalised economy that generates shared prosperity.

The third element we will need for a multipolar order to function is greater involvement from major and middle powers in the management and provision of what academics call global public goods. These include, for example, combating climate change, security, defence, and fighting inequality.

In short, emerging powers and established powers must provide these global public goods.

Size doesn’t just imply power; it also carries a responsibility that cannot be delegated. Because the major problems of the 21st century don’t need visas, they cross borders, and they affect us all.

I’m thinking, for example, of the fight against climate change or the challenges posed by global health, the development of responsible artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons control, the eradication of poverty, and, as I mentioned before, the safeguarding of global health. Funding in these latter areas has fallen by 23% in the last year alone – 23%.

Without the cooperation of the major powers, and of course China as well, these goals are not just difficult, they are simply unattainable. I know that China is fully aware of this and is doing a great deal, which I applaud. But I believe that China can do more. For example, by demanding, as it is doing, that international law be respected and that the conflicts in Lebanon, Iran, Gaza, the West Bank, and Ukraine cease. Because international law is the foundation of everything. By sharing its technology with the most disadvantaged countries, by forgiving debt, and by contributing to the financing of the system through participation in swap programs.

Naturally, Europe will also have to redouble its efforts, especially now that the United States has decided to withdraw from many of these fronts. Europe’s contribution is and will be essential. Therefore, I humbly ask that you also see this and not fall into the error of Matteo Ricci and be misled by maps.

Because Europe may seem small on a world map, but in reality, it’s quite the opposite. The facts are these: the European Union is currently the world’s largest trading bloc and the second largest economy. It is also the leading recipient of Foreign Direct Investment. It has the second most innovative ecosystem. It also boasts a highly skilled workforce. It is the second most productive economy on the planet and ranks first in terms of life satisfaction, social cohesion, and well-being.

I don’t mean to boast or hide our many shortcomings, which we certainly have. What I mean is that Europe is a key player in global stability, prosperity, and peace, and that without a united Europe – and therefore without fragmentation – there cannot be, nor will there be, a stable international order or a prosperous future for humanity, just as there cannot be without the participation of this great country, China. That is why we are called to understand each other and cooperate.

Dear teachers and students, I’ll conclude now. Four centuries after Matteo Ricci arrived in China and had to correct his map, humanity continues to search for the fairest perspective to see the world as it truly is, and not as dictated by power or prejudice.

A few days ago, four American astronauts traveled farther from Earth than any other human being has ever done. And from there, they perhaps gained that perspective. From there, they saw Earth as it truly is: a sphere without edges or boundaries.

A unique, unrepeatable blue sphere in the most hostile environment imaginable. We humans are the result of that miracle. Perhaps the only one in the universe. And therefore, it is our duty to understand each other and cooperate to ensure that this miracle continues to thrive.

Thank you very much. Xie xie.

Just a quick intervention after reading a well-reported piece in the Financial Times, about a rift in European military security thinking. The upshot:

The EU and Nato are at odds in what officials describe as a “turf war” over how to manage an extra $1tn a year rearmament drive prompted by Donald Trump’s threats to European security…“It’s becoming increasingly clear that we need this stuff quickly, in large quantities and cost-effectively,” said one of the EU officials. “And the way to do that is to manufacture it at home.

NATO and the EU both agree on securing themselves more “strategic autonomy,” but only the EU wants to do so by creating a degree of actual independence, in the form of making weapons development and acquisition an intra-European process rather than one that continues to rely on the United States. It seems obvious that Europe should not trust US arms production any more than it would trust Chinese arms production (arguably the US should be even less trusted since its weapons-making and sales are connected to a global coercive apparatus that China lacks and could never replicate).

The EU has not exactly covered itself in glory in recent years, and I have a low opinion of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. But Mark Rutte, NATO secretary-general, is a real bootlicker. His America-philia does not speak on behalf of the European interest, and there is no hope of realizing a meaningfully Independent Europe if the continent is dependent on US weapons procurement.

Meanwhile, in Washington, there has long been a conventional wisdom that NATO is apple pie—uncontroversial, everyone loves it, etc. Like many things Washingtonians believe, it’s not quite true, but no matter. The fig leaf such fiction affords is just large enough to obscure what lies underneath—the shriveled truth, that NATO is primarily a stand-in for American power.

“NATO is good!” is a premise that more policy people should resist, or at least critically question…especially when it’s on the wrong side of war crimes. I supported a (non-expanded) version of NATO as recently as 2022, but the world has changed, and the veneration of this imperial institution directly stands in the way of Europe becoming independent and capable of managing its own relations with the world.

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ICYMI:

Critically acclaimed actor and star of HBO’s The Gilded Age, Morgan Spector, joins me for a special, ambitious, and wide-ranging episode of the pod:

• Why did the US invade Iran? What does it have to do with American imperial decline? Why do oligarchs need the permanent war economy?

• Why is left populism impossible without an anti-war movement?

• What should a leftist or progressive foreign policy actually look like?

• Is AOC an organic intellectual, and what do we need from her foreign policy?

• Why did Bernie Sanders shift from talking about kleptocracy to talking about oligarchy?

• What are the prospects for left populism at home and anti-imperialism abroad?

• And why is political reform both possible and desirable in a revolutionary conjuncture?

Catch the episode wherever you get podcasts, or watch on YouTube.

Follow Morgan Spector on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/epluribusyourmom/

Hey, friend! You might have noticed that I’m offering more of Un-Diplomatic without the paywall; I’m trying to keep as much as possible public. But to do that requires your help because Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported. As we experiment with keeping our content paywall-free, please consider the less than $2 per week it takes to keep this critical analysis going.

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ICYMI:

Much celebration in my corner of the internet about the crushing electoral defeat of Viktor Orban in Hungary. After 16 years of ethnonationalist, patriarchal, reactionary politics, he’s out.

The reason for the celebration by people who have no connection to this small Eastern European country is simple: Orban was a far-right politician who tried to rig his own election and lost anyway, meaning that electoral democracy remains one path out of the fascistic nightmare looming over many Western countries.

More than that, Hungary was viewed by far-right politicos around the world as an incubator or testbed for how to govern as an elected dictator. “Anti-woke” blather, anti-communist hysteria (still), taking away women’s rights, colluding with other far-right forces abroad to form a literal Global Far Right—Hungary was considered ground zero for that project the past decade. Much of Trump’s Project 2025 was copied and pasted from Orban’s experience in Hungary. So much so that Budapest hosted the US Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2022, where a bunch of American national conservatives signed a manifesto of counter-revolution that we’ve seen in evidence since 2025.

It’s certainly good news that it’s at least possible to claw back a little democracy via the ballot box. It does give one hope, even if every country’s ability to appeal to electoral remedy will differ greatly. And as Lily Lynch writes, the election outcome does have implications outside Hungary.

But all is not well. Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party is center-right. There is no reason to think they will govern as anything other than Macron-esque neoliberals. We can expect less persecution of trans people, immigrants, and women. That’s something.

But if we think about who benefits under both far-right and neoliberal regimes, we see that Hungary’s election does not resolve—and is likely to perpetuate—the underlying economic precarity that gave rise to the far-right in the first place.

David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism describes neoliberalism as a project of a small section of the capitalist class that networked together through the Business Roundtable, Chambers of Commerce, the Global Business Network, and a patchwork of right-wing think tanks. The purpose of neoliberalism was to steer state power against organized labor and toward a regime of horizonless capital accumulation—ie, deregulation, privatization of public assets, tax cuts, and corporate welfare.

Because neoliberalism served primarily a small section of elites, it needed a popular political base with at least the prospect of being majoritarian. Right-wing identity politics was its popular base, putting neoliberal capitalists in league with the religious right. It was thus by design, not happenstance, that the rise of neoliberalism and the rise of the religious right both began in the 1970s.

But how do you continue to govern as neoliberals over time if the plight of the working classes keeps getting predictably worse (bespeaking the correctness of Harvey’s characterization of what neoliberalism is)? Well, that’s the entire point of far-right populism—exploit identity-politics grievances so that capitalists can hoard wealth even under deteriorating economic circumstances. It’s not trans athletes who are raising your rent, it’s your landlord. It’s not immigrants who are making the price of bread and gas go up; it’s your corrupt-ass government. But far-right identity politics distracts from those with power in favor of scapegoating.

Orban was radically far-right in terms of his social agenda. But his was also a fairly typical right-wing political regime in economic terms. And so it’s worth paying attention to who benefited and who suffered materially within his far-right fantasy.

According to the Financial Times, 13 close associates of Orban—actual oligarchs—enriched themselves via Orban’s allocations of state power. Tens of billions of Euros-worth of government contracts were routed to Orban’s friends (again, classic oligarchy shit). In analyzing 350k public contracts, those companies that supported Orban’s re-election campaigns were observably more likely to win business from the government:

The FT’s analysis shows that 14 per cent of all the funds awarded in state tenders under Orbán went to 42 companies owned by the 13 associates. They had won just 1 per cent between 2005 and his election in 2010. In total, they netted more than €28bn in government tenders from 2010 to late 2025, either alone or as part of consortiums — an average of €1.8bn a year. In the five years before Orbán took power combined, they won only a third of that annual average: €608mn.

If it’s the oligarchs who benefited from Orban’s regime, who paid? Everybody else. A separate analysis from the Financial Times showed Hungary’s economy to be vastly underperforming the EU average and the plight of workers was also vastly worse than the EU average:

It is definitionally impossible to have good governance under a far-right regime. But that’s the idea: far-right identity politics to facilitate class war (against workers). That is a logical extension of the bargain of neoliberalism itself. And the economic conditions that neoliberalism wrought are what incubated far-right “populism.”

So there’s a way in which we can look at Hungary’s electoral repudiation of Orbanism and read our hopes into its situation. But if we’re clear-eyed, what Hungary also shows is that any electoral path out of autocracy that simply replaces ethnonationalism with neoliberalism is accomplishing little more than promising the return of the far-right in mutated form.

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I never thought I would write about toilet paper but here I am.

A 29-year old worker in an Ontario, California toilet-paper warehouse had his kettle of desperation finally boil over into a massive arson. A video posted online shows the accused arsonist holding up a lighter while the toilet-paper blaze spread, commenting:

You may not pay us enough to fucking live, but these bitches are dirt cheap. There goes your inventory. All you had to do was pay us enough to live.

Joker-core is merely the wounded mutation of what could’ve been a righteous rebellion of the people against the ruling class, and still might be. Nobody was hurt but the massive (1.2 million square foot) facility burned to the ground. The warehouse was supposedly worth $156 million and the damage wrought has been estimated at $500 million. His slogan is also proliferating:

Violence Without Harm, or Alienation?

The arson is being portrayed in the news as a random act by a disgruntled employee, nothing more. And the national security state is likely to treat it as an act of “terrorism,” a term that has actually lost all meaning except that it indicates the state will use extreme anti-democratic measures against the offending party. But this is a smoke signal that reveals a mystified aspect of our conjuncture.

We’re made to believe that the world just is what it is. If you suffer anything, it’s not because of government choices or people with power; it’s because of weird personal shit or bad luck. They tell you that unions are weak because America is anti-union, not because oligarchs have collaborated with politicians since the 1970s to use state power and legislation to destroy the labor movement. They tell you there is no alternative.

But this is what makes the arson a smoke signal: It’s of a category with Luigi Mangione’s assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO and the Molotov cocktail that made its way to Sam Altman’s house recently.

Workers have leverage against capital—they can shut shit down in more ways than one! This act of arson—which, based on its popularity online will surely inspire similar types of direct action—harkens back to a militant strategy of “violence without harm” promoted by Bhagat Singh in the fight for Indian independence. The Weather Underground during the Cold War didn’t use that phrase but employed similar tactics, destroying buildings but not taking lives.1

But the arson was not an act of strategy; it was a cry of desperation. In a different version of the multiverse, the arsonist would’ve had a union that was strong enough to secure his living wage and a government that ensured he didn’t have to worry about getting sick or having a roof over his head. The source of pain leading to arson would simply not be there. But this version of the multiverse isolates man and woman. Without association, we have no collective power. Or at least we’re made to feel that way.

But if the system of exploitation keeps ratcheting its squeeze on the wages and working conditions of labor for the sake of maximizing profit, eventually you hit a breaking point. You can only sheer a sheep so deep before you’re actually skinning it. I’m talking about capitalists cannibalizing the very labor that produces the surplus value that keeps capitalism going. When you’re cutting into muscle, you’re going to get spasmodic reactions.

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Immiseration in the Data

The toilet paper warehouse was owned by a firm called Kimberly-Clark, which produces toilet paper, Huggies, Kleenex, Q-Tips, Depends, and on and on. Last November, Kimberley-Clark committed $40 billion to acquire Kenvue, a similar health-products company, promising in the same press statement to reduce its 22k-person workforce by 3.5%.

Last month, workers filed a case with the National Labor Relations Board accusing Kimberly-Clark of refusing to bargain with unions. In 2018, a global trade union meeting publicly condemned Kimberley-Clark for “heavy-handed tactics,” cutting worker jobs, and closing plants without prior consultation. Since 2000, the company has had to pay $81 million in penalties for labor-law violations.

My point is that the company generates huge profits from low-margin products, it has a history of immiserating the labor that produces its surpluses, and its current strategy sees it simultaneously 1) refusing to bargain with workers, 2) cutting jobs, and 3) nevertheless mobilizing $40 billion to acquire another profit center for its business.

This is all normal capitalism shit! But it’s not happening in a vacuum. Ever heard of the K-shaped economy? Since the dawning of the neoliberal era in the 1970s, capital’s share of national income has grown at the expense of labor’s share of national income. Many scholars have pronounced neoliberalism a dead doctrine since 2020, but the share of income going to workers is at its lowest in 50+ years:

There’s also been a “k-shaped recovery” from the Great Recession of the Obama years. Most workers have lived precariously since ’08 but the wealthiest households have both benefited most from state interventions (eg, Inflation Reduction Act), and now account for most consumption buoying the economy, leading to a reality that America does not have one economy but two:

Like George Carlin said, “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it!”

Organic Intellectuals Wanted

I know what it is to collapse into delirium from overwork. To become dead-eyed just so that you can get through your shift. To sleepwalk through a life that becomes unreal, where everything gets fuzzy around the edges and people almost stop being people. To feel the existential claustrophobia that sets in when you realize poverty has robbed you of any future at all. If you don’t understand that, I don’t know if you can understand the severity of the crisis bearing down on us all.

The toilet-paper arson is a byproduct of the oligarchy reflected in the data. And yet the policy wonks who make and interpret k-shaped data charts are not trained to grasp the pain of living on the losing end of the data; it’s all abstractions and logic puzzles and, somehow, “great-power competition.” And most wonks do not come from social circumstances that would have exposed them to what it’s like to eat shit in the real economy anyway.

Public policy—especially foreign policy—is sterile and its makers are aloof of the active harm it’s doing to growing numbers of Americans. The problem is reaching absurd levels under Trump but was already a growing global crisis of the precariat under Biden and Obama too.

One aspect of the problem, or at least one aspect of why precarity is so difficult to fix, is that policy intellectuals are traditional intellectuals of the status quo. They are churned out by elite finishing schools that reproduce the social order that sustains a worsening oligarchy at home and empire abroad. Such people, even if they have good intentions, don’t know the taste of immiseration and probably think they don’t need to in order to do their jobs.

This is why the working class needs what Gramsci called “organic intellectuals” of its own—people who can articulate the interests of the masses, who can explain how and why the people share an objective solidarity of position as exploited, surplus, and repressed labor. Organic intellectuals must be by and for the class whose interests they represent. They must know the taste of pain that makes the working class more unified in its interests than workers themselves might realize. It is the role of the organic intellectual to express into being what makes it possible to even speak of a working class. And in bringing about the consciousness of the worker in a shared project, it makes collective action possible. And collective action is the opposite of random acts of arson and assassination.

Our moment is calling out for organic intellectuals of the working class. A flaming warehouse full of toilet paper is the demand signal.

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In January, Elbridge Colby, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, summoned a top Vatican diplomat to both rebut a recent peace-forward, anti-imperialist speech the Pope gave and—according to multiple accounts—threaten the freaking Pope. You can’t make this stuff up.

The Pope’s speech called for disarmament, critiqued nationalism, and bemoaned

the growing violations of hard-won treaties, at a time when what is needed is the strengthening of supranational institutions, not their delegitimization.

The Pope even criticized imbalances of power in the world.

The Trump administration had been hoping to have the Pope visit the US and to co-opt his religious authority for electoral gain (a Vatican official said that’s not happening). But the meeting between Colby and the Pope’s representative was also a clash of worldviews and Colby wanted to deliver what witnesses describe as a “bitter lecture” inveighing against peace and in favor primacy, nationalism, and military force.

The right-wing Free Press reported that Colby conveyed the US could do “whatever it wants” with military power and “picked apart the pontiff’s January speech” as a challenge to Trump’s Monroe Doctrine. As tensions escalated, either Colby or one of his staffers (almost certainly Colby given how these meetings work) invoked the Avignon Papacy, a 14th-century parable in which the French King threatened force to physically relocate the papacy to Avignon, where France controlled it for 67 years. The threat implied that force, not religious teaching, was the supreme authority and that the Vatican “better take our side.”

All of this has a taste of the personal. In a previous life, I worked collegially with Colby at a DC think tank, when he was a Mitt Romney republican and I was an Obama democrat. We both evolved in obviously opposing directions. But the office he now presides over in the Pentagon is also the office where I worked during the Obama administration. The table depicted in the picture above is one I sat at many times.

And while I’m no longer religious, I studied for my PhD at the Catholic University of America, where I was exposed to two radically different tendencies within the Catholic Church. One was the religiously inflected paleoconservative Catholicism that became MAGA—an ideological strand of the Trump administration (Newt Gingrich took Sunday service on my campus whenever he was in town). The other tendency was what you might call Christian socialism. Any straightforward reading of the bible and Jesus’s teachings would have us fight for peace, help the poor, and condemn the rich.

And it’s this latter tradition—which runs counter to the distorted Catholicism that prevails within MAGA—that Pope Leo XIV tapped into with his disarmament speech. So there’s a deep antagonism underneath the surface when it comes to how we should understand the Catholic faith and what we owe our fellow human beings. Because JD Vance—who helped Colby get confirmed to his current position—is a late-convert to Catholicism, one way of understanding this entire episode is as a battle for the soul of the Catholic Church and its 1.6 billion followers.

But there’s something else, more geopolitical. While it’s extraordinarily unusual for a Pentagon official to summon a representative of the Vatican, in this instance it made sense because Colby knows his Reagan-era history.

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In the 1980s, the Reagan administration incubated a bunch of warmongers who would later be identified as neocons—Paul Wolfowitz being their leading avatar. They were the reason the military budget doubled under Reagan, they fought against detente with China, and they steered Reagan toward a containment strategy and nuclear superiority against the Soviet Union. Needless to say, it was these proto-neocons who were vehemently opposed to arms control. This is the genealogy that Colby himself emerges from and carries the torch for.

The Catholic Church figures into this history because, as we all know, Reagan eventually pursued summit diplomacy with Gorbachev and undertook some arms control initiatives with the Soviet Union—moves that helped end the Cold War peacefully. But Reagan would not have made that pivot—which went against the advice of most of the staff surrounding him—if not for the popularity of the Nuclear Freeze movement. And one very important constituency in the Nuclear Freeze movement was the Catholic Church.

An excellent book on this period by Henry Maar recounts how a large portion of the Republican base was Catholic and the Pope’s authority resonated much more powerfully at that time than today. When the Pope came out in favor of the Nuclear Freeze—which demanded halting all production, testing, and deployment of nukes—Reagan officials were boxed into a corner. The Reagan administration did not want to be seen opposing the Catholic Church because it would divide the Republican base. But the hawks could not stomach arms control as a threat to their fantasies of nuclear domination and Chuck Norris-style military adventurism.

Colby knows all this, and from his vantage point, sees it as a cautionary tale—keep papal authority aligned with state power or put the project of militarism and religious ethnonationalism at risk. Colby rightly fears the Pope’s moral authority, and appears to have summoned a Vatican diplomat in hopes of coercing Catholicism’s subordination to the Trump administration.

He failed miserably. The Pentagon-Pope saga became public only against the backdrop of the Iran War. And the papacy’s position in that war could not be more opposed. In response to Trump’s message a few days ago that “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” the Pope decried the war as unjust:

Today, as we all know, there was this threat against all the people of Iran. This is truly unacceptable…we have a worldwide economic crisis, energy crisis, situation in the Middle East of great instability, which is only provoking more hatred throughout the world.

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Emergency livestreamed episode of the pod covering:

• the terms of the US-Iran ceasefire;

• why it signals the end of US hegemony;

• the risks of nuclear war, which remain in place;

• Israel’s role as a spoiler; indicators of Chinese hegemony (or not);

• the limits of US power; and

• what it means to think of Iran as a great power controlling the Strait of Hormuz.

Catch the episode wherever you get podcasts, or watch on YouTube.

Just a quick plea: If you find my project useful, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported, and my decision last year to make most of my posts public (unpaywalled) has cost me a lot. You can help keep my critical analysis going for the less than $2 per week!

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ICYMI:

We should be worried about either the US or Israel using nukes against Iran.

I’ve been concerned about the “fascist nuke problem” since 2023. The same ideological blind spot in Western analysis that accommodates a genocide in Gaza would accommodate either the US or Israel busting the nuclear taboo. In the most perverse way, nuclear war would be a logical morbid symptom of America’s imperial decline.

But there’s two parts worth addressing here. One might seem pedantic, the other is the substantive sources of my angst.

Risks, Not Likelihoods, of Nuclear War

Regarding pedantry, you see the following question quite often, especially from journalists:

The guy in the post above is soliciting an objective probability that does not exist. He wants to put a number on the odds of something happening that can’t be assigned a number in any meaningful sense. Which is to say that asking for a percentage chance of nuclear war is an error in categorical reasoning.

When we assign objective probabilities to an event, it’s because we can observe a full distribution of possible outcomes and then calculate the likelihood of the thing happening. You can assign an objective probability to being dealt an ace in your next hand of Blackjack because the range of possibilities is limited by what’s in the deck; known and calculable.

But when we can’t map the full range of possible outcomes and don’t have enough observations of a thing to estimate frequency, we can only assign a subjective probability. And the thing about subjective probability is that it’s a fancy way of saying “In my opinion…” It’s finger-in-the-wind shit.

If it’s true that, in the language of rationalist political science, “war is in the error term,” then nuclear war is literally unpredictable.

And yet!

The risks of nuclear war can go up and down. Maybe you can’t predict someone getting cancer with any reliability, but you can diagnose whether a person is more or less prone to get it based on the intersection of risk factors. This is how we should think about the risks of nuclear war: They can compound and amplify, making situations more or less prone to nuclear weapons use. All nuclear crises are dangerous but not equally so.

Bottom line: The chances of nuclear war are unknowable; the risk factors of nuclear war are both knowable and currently catastrophically high.

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Why the US/Israel Could Nuke Iran

In the last three days, Trump has made two threats of war crimes and an explicit threat to commit genocide that many people are interpreting as a nuclear threat.

A unique source of risk from Trump is that he has impaired judgment, both because he is not rational in relation to the state and he is comically incompetent. Accordingly, Trump is prone to miscalculation—which is how he got into this mad war with Iran that even other bad presidents managed to avoid.

Another, much deeper, source of nuclear risk is that, as an avatar of what I described as the fascist nuke problem, Trump lacks the key barrier to nuclear use that a moral person would have:

The nuclear trouble here, if it is not obvious, is that if you can de-humanize one you can de-humanize all. This was always the most terrifying thing about Trump, it’s built into his politics, and you cannot really separate it from a willingness to engage in mass-casualty violence…The way we think about nuclear deterrence has an ideological blind spot when it comes to extremist politics like fascism (or whatever synonym you prefer)…the dehumanization of a population is at least a favorable condition (if not a prerequisite) for wielding nuclear death over them.

This will to violence predicated on mass dehumanization along civilizational lines equally applies to Israel. And the risk of Israeli nuclear use is heightened by the fact that Israel does not acknowledge possessing nuclear weapons, which, in its genocidal logic, means it has a lawfare pretext to use nukes and then deny it.

The other source of risk is situational: Trump is trapped in an escalation spiral that has no off-ramp other than unilateral ceasefire. There is a risk that Trump sees the nuclear gambit as a way to escape his self-made trap while saving face as a strongman. The risk of that mindset grows because of its context: the alternative—continuing the war—will accumulate more US losses, deplete America’s munitions stockpiles, and induce a global financial crisis. Gamblers facing the prospect of loss have higher risk propensities.

Finally, we should consider some comparisons with other nuclear crises, if only to grasp how dangerous our situation is now.

When Trump threatened “fire and fury” against North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in 2017 and early 2018, we were far closer to nuclear war than most people think. I wrote an entire book (and made a very amateur doc) about this. We avoided nuclear war then in spite of Trump, not because of him. South Korea wanted to end the crisis, served as a peace broker, and helped Trump frame a loss (Kim Jong Un getting a nuclear ICBM) as a win via summit diplomacy. The North Korea case, then, suggests something terrible for our current moment: We would’ve already had nuclear war if not for luck, and we have no reason to believe that we can get so lucky again now.

There was also heightened risk of nuclear war in the early stages of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But at least in that case, force checked force—there was a mutual fear inducing restraint in Washington and Moscow, and Putin was egoistically rational (if malign).

In the ongoing Iran War, we don’t have dueling nuclear powers—we have nuclear-armed predators waging what they think is a civilizational war against people whom they see as less than human. And we have them losing that war in meaningful ways while possessing escalation dominance. The intersecting risk indicators are flashing red over Iran. God help us get lucky again.

Hey, friend! You might have noticed that I’m offering more of Un-Diplomatic without the paywall; I’m trying to keep as much as possible public. But to do that requires your help because Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported. As we experiment with keeping our content paywall-free, please consider the less than $2 per week it takes to keep this critical analysis going.

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Long ago, somebody tried to explain to me that Americans are the most propagandized people on earth. At the time, I found that risible; I was a different person and wasn’t hearing it. But these days, I find myself using that line all the time—and I say it advisedly, as someone who spent most of my early career studying North Korea.

I have many American friends, fellow travelers, collaborators, and comrades fighting the good fight against war and wealth-hoarding, but they exist in an information eco-system that works against their every breath. MAGA as an ideology has no aspiration to being hegemonic and is not even a majoritarian project.1 But American exceptionalism and militarism are hegemonic in American life, and MAGA exploits the hell out of that. Like every American, I was raised to believe the United States is a beneficent power, and that when it does wrong, it does so with good intentions. That is, of course, hard to square with a culture that venerates violence and warmaking above seemingly all other values.

The ongoing narration of America’s depraved war against Iran is making the problem of pro-militarist propaganda quite urgent.

The “War Crimes Are Good for The Economy” Debate

When the Wall Street Journal published a piece this morning claiming that “The Iran War Is Making the American Economy More Dominant Than Ever,” my reflex was “LOL, no it’s not.”

Even the Bezos-natsec propaganda rag formerly known as the Washington Post acknowledges that the Iran war is profoundly economically harmful. But neither the WSJ nor WaPo question the foreseeable mass death and destruction that was unleashed on the whole of the Middle East for no good reason and that now threatens to engulf the world in financial crisis.2

The media scribes who feed Americans information evade both America’s habit of war crimes and the false pretenses on which war crimes are being committed; they channel your attention only to these sociopathic cost-benefit questions about whether despicable acts of evil are maybe good (or not so good) for Americans.

The Analysis Trap

Or take the “munitions shortfall” discourse. Defense nerds have long known that the limited US inventory of missiles and missile interceptors was a constraint on the US way of war. But they couldn’t do anything about it because munitions are a low-margin product that military contractors can’t profit much from unless they can make them at scale (ie, unless the US is blowing through its inventory).

This very real munitions shortfall is putting the US military in a bad position according to its own aims: Cannibalizing its war-prepper materiel for Asia to keep war-criming (to no particular end) in Iran. But take one of the better strategic arguments I’ve seen:

The intervention here is quite good in its own way but the premise is false. The US can’t win a conventional war against China—a conclusion I long resisted but without which I might not have written The Rivalry Peril. The reason China hasn’t yet invaded Taiwan isn’t because of US missiles.3 And there is no number of standoff munitions that will enable America to beat China in a fight over Taiwan without risking nuclear war.

Still, OP is making an implicitly anti-war argument (“The Iran war should stop because we’re blowing through our munitions”). There is a policy audience that, in theory, can be reached with this kind of argument. But the way it finds expression is in the language of deterrence on behalf of Sino-US war…which is the primary source of the $1.5 trillion-dollar war machine. Most of America’s high-technology force structure is justified solely in relation to war with China. So using the war with China as an argument against a specific war reifies the larger apparatus being used in the war you’re against.

If the language of opposition to one war is the language of much larger war preparations elsewhere, then we are lost. At minimum, it’s a sign of just how hegemonic militarism is in American life.

“Support Our Troops” But Also Send Them To Die

I flew through Reagan National in 2024 and it sucked in many respects but not like this:

As a veteran and a free-thinking human being, I’m disgusted by this display of banners claiming to honor those who served by dishonoring the truth about what these wars were. For god’s sake, banners for Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq!? The US did not bring freedom to these places; it brought slaughter and sacrificed millions of lives on the altar of denying these places sovereign rule. Even the Cold War gets a banner! Not to mention that the military buildups associated with each of these wars directly caused financial crises and perpetuated the very system strangling American workers today on behalf of oligarchs.

But if you’re just an American trying to make ends meet and get through your work week, you don’t have time for critical scrutiny of all this propaganda. You’re just trying to get to the right terminal and find a place to buy a $10 bottle of water. So you let the propaganda bombard you without too much push back, and inevitably much of it seeps in.

All of this leaves us in a terrible position.

The good guys in the mainstream are, in Gramsci’s language, fighting “wars of maneuver” while losing “wars of position.” In Fanon’s language, we’re dealing with the “events” but not the “situation.” The terrain on which we struggle is becoming more unfavorable even as our ranks are swelling every day. This is why the world needs America to revive the antiwar movement—to puncture the myth of American exceptionalism and contest the hegemony of militarism. To fight wars of position alongside wars of maneuver against, ironically, war itself.

Hey, friend! You might have noticed that I’m offering more of Un-Diplomatic without the paywall; I’m trying to keep as much as possible public. But to do that requires your help because Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported. As we experiment with keeping our content paywall-free, please consider the less than $2 per week it takes to keep this critical analysis going.

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Latest episode of the pod, just in time for the holidays:

• AOC announces that she opposes arming Israel in any way—a welcome shift.

• What makes the Iran war a class war that takes money from every worker in the world.

• NATO has many problems, but its biggest is the United States.

• What makes the world post-hegemonic; new signs that the United States repudiates its own form status as global hegemon.

• Why slaughter is not a strategy—the Trump administration admits that bombing targets (not opening the Strait of Hormuz) is its only aim.

• Ed Luce of the Financial Times has a chat with Trump about Iran and it’s a disaster on multiple levels.

Catch the episode wherever you get podcasts, or watch on YouTube.

Hey, friend! You might have noticed that I’m offering more of Un-Diplomatic without the paywall; I’m trying to keep as much as possible public. But to do that requires your help because Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported. As we experiment with keeping our content paywall-free, please consider the less than $2 per week it takes to keep this critical analysis going.

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ICYMI:

Bang-Bang

Independence Day (1996), w/ Morgan Spector | Ep. 64

Van and Lyle are joined by critically acclaimed actor Morgan Spector to revisit Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, a film that turns planetary annihilation into a distinctly American spectacle. We spend time lingering on the movie as a shared artifact of a particular 1990s childhood. The Ray Charles warmth of its opening, the awe of its destruction sequences, and, of course, the internalization of President Whitmore’s speech—“Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!”—memorized and recited by every other boy of that era. It opens, tellingly, on the American flag planted on the moon, Neil Armstrong’s voice echoing as if the “giant leap for mankind” had always been a national possession. When the aliens arrive, they don’t just threaten Earth but a worldview in which the United States stands in for humanity itself…

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a month ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Van and Lyle are Bang-Bang

Last night, I spoke at a peace-activist event in Wellington. Terrific, diverse crowd, and much larger than I expected. It came at the end of a long, exhausting day for me, so I wasn’t at my best, but it still ended up being a really rich discussion.

A few summary observations.

Protests should be promises

I had to teach yesterday for three hours before the evening talk, and it just so happens that I was discussing with my students a piece by Olufemi Taiwo arguing that protests should be promises:

for protests to succeed, they must be backed by movements with the ability to promise to withhold—labor, debt payments, rent payments, or consumer support—and to follow through if demands aren’t met. Protests by such movements consequently morph into real, tangible promises: demonstrations of an ability to escalate, backed by strategic leverage.

I brought this up during the event, and I think it landed well because others referenced it repeatedly throughout the night. It’s simply a useful way to think about protest organizing. It also means that labor unions and the antiwar movement need to be arms akimbo.

In many countries, party politics strip people of their power, and that might be the case in New Zealand too. For protests to be promises, the power relation between civil society and parties needs to be inverted. And to make that happen, organized labor and organized peace activists must exercise their power not only by putting demands to the state, but also putting demands to the electoral parties that claim to represent their interests. That won’t happen if they’re not unified.

We’ve got a standpoint-epistemology problem

Several Iranian dissidents and ethnically Persian Kiwis were present. They were against both the war and the theocratic regime. Their politics are democracy-and-equality first. That puts me on their side. And yet they acknowledged deep polarization within the Iranian diaspora globally, and I was reminded of that as I saw news of Iranians in the US holding pro-Israel protests cheering on the war…gross and blinkered and insane.

I only bring this up because “Listen to Iranians!” is a call that is far too easily co-opted by warmongers and owners of capital. Which Iranians???

The opportunity within a Global Financial Crisis

Of all the wars America’s been fighting and funding in recent years, the Iran War is unique in its catastrophic potential for two reasons.

One is that Iran has a military strategy that counters the US way of war; the Trump administration has shown no sign of understanding that. The other thing that makes Iran unique is that its military has proven the ability to exercise control of the Strait of Hormuz, which is among the most important geographic choke points in the world.

It’s these two things—a winning military strategy and strategic chokepoint control—that have thrown us into an energy crisis that we’re only just beginning to feel but is guaranteed to be much worse than the ’73 OPEC crisis. Because the Iran war is directly causing a global financial and food crisis, it is taking money from every worker in the world.

Most American wars tend to concentrate pain in specific geographies, but this one creates global pain. Nobody escapes it. And the fact that we’re all paying for the Iran war creates an objective solidarity of position. All that remains is a solidarity of consciousness and strategy.

China never came up

I didn’t think to bring up the China angle on the Iran war in any of the discussions (I was very tired), and nobody else raised it either. I’ll have more to say about this when I have a bit of free time (lol), but China does not appear to want hegemony.

China could be providing Iran with a mirror-image of America’s Israel policy (qualitative military edge, QME). It could be positioning itself as the guarantor of regional stability, a broker of peace. It could unfurl a grand proposal for Yuan supremacy in the Middle East, building on the existing arrangement that Iran has established whereby ships pass through the Strait only if they negotiate safe passage with Iran directly and denominate their transaction in Chinese currency.

If China did these things, it would be the hegemon of the Middle East. It’s not. What appears to be emerging instead is, as I’ve argued many times, a kind of multipolarity or non polarity. No single reserve currency. Regions will exhibit their own multipolarity. Distant power projection can cause chaos to financial markets but not much else. And Iran will exercise administrative control over the Strait of Hormuz while the US functionally abandons policing global shipping lanes. Even by the narrowest definitions of hegemony that is a post-hegemonic world. Not a new Chinese hegemony; a post-hegemonic world.

Hey, friend! You might have noticed that I’m offering more of Un-Diplomatic without the paywall; I’m trying to keep as much as possible public. But to do that requires your help because Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported. As we experiment with keeping our content paywall-free, please consider the less than $2 per week it takes to keep this critical analysis going.

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ICYMI:

In response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, George W. Bush opened up a world-altering Global War on Terror that cost $6 trillion and counting, and destroyed 900,000+ lives.

But if you watch The O.C.,1 a drama that depicts Southern-California life at its finest and was launched five months after the Iraq invasion, you’ll see no sign of that disastrous war. No depictions at all of the feds visiting terror upon Muslims in America. No wrestling with the massive expansion of the US security state or the lives it stole abroad. Foreign policy simply didn’t exist in the world of The O.C. It’s a perfect visual representation of Americans’ relationship to what their state did during these years.

That aloof relationship to the state was by design. Only two weeks after 9/11, Bush told Americans:

Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.

And enjoy life we did.

Everyone agrees now that Bush’s strategic judgment was quite poor, and that Americans were not well served by either Iraq or the Global War on Terror. But Bush—as someone trying to exercise US power on behalf of American hegemony—got one thing very right: He preserved an alternate reality in which Americans could spend their time submerged in consumerism and home renovations, reality TV and culture-war jousting.

By avoiding a war tax, racking up deficits to pay for a military buildup, and relying on an “all-volunteer force,” Bush preserved the illusion that war is other people’s problems. Americans could not only avoid acknowledging the imperial warmaking that was tied to their mode of living, but also fail to see the degraded quality of life they endured so that their government could continue dehumanizing criminality abroad. Bush followed the lineage of every president since the Vietnam War in preserving this state of unconsciousness, which is rapidly falling apart.

I first learned of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s rules of primacy working in Obama’s Pentagon, because some of my military counterparts had it quoted and pinned to their cubicle walls.2 Zbig argued that American primacy required using state power to achieve three things:

to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.

What Zbig did not address was the domestic sphere. The polis. The home front. His imperialist aims necessitated imperial warmaking (“wars of choice”), and that necessitated something that politicians had instinctually understood, if only to avoid an electoral death blow or sagging poll numbers.

What Zbig failed to articulate in his otherwise morbidly candid manifesto is the real first rule of imperial warmaking: Never let voters connect the experience of pain at home to either wars done abroad or to the permanent war economy. A domestic social order that sustains global domination depends on obscuring the cause-and-effect of American death dealing (and who profits from it).

This is Trump’s greatest fuckup.

Invading Iran is the geopolitical equivalent of grabbing the world by the p****y and expecting not to get slapped. He thinks they let you do it. And how could he not when Washington was complicit in a genocide before he even came back to the White House, or after world leaders let his illegal war on Venezuela slide?

But we live in a world of consequences regardless whether world leaders acknowledge it.

Americans are paying a steep and growing price for Trump’s imperial misadventures. Americans always pay a price, even when their politicians encourage them to believe they’re offloading the cost of war onto foreign others (allies and enemies alike). The nous of previous presidents in observing the first rule of empire meant tailoring war so that the consequences for Americans were hard to perceive. But now, voters can’t help but notice they’re being soaked.

When the military budget soars to $1.5 trillion in order to sustain a series of illegal wars—and simultaneously cuts welfare programs, Medicaid, higher education funding, and the federal workforce to offset the expense—the guns-butter tradeoff tells on itself. “Productivity” rises to unprecedented levels, alongside unemployment. Gas costs too much. Food costs too much. Electricity costs too much. Signs demanding “No War With Iran” in everything from ICE protests to #NoKings rallies are signs that the first rule of imperial warmaking has been broken:

American empire was always predicated on the idea of a “spatial fix”—violence, domination, and extraction over there so as to preserve what we’ve got going on over here. The grand strategy of primacy is a strategy-washed version of the same—forward military basing in “key regions” is thought to keep enemy violence quarantined in those regions. The myth of the American frontier embodies this same spatial reasoning, giving rise to a mistaken belief that American empire abroad revitalizes American republicanism at home. The exceptionalism at the root of the American frontier myth is common to all empires and, in that sense, pathologically unexceptional.

But the spatial fix is fake. The home front has never been immune to the consequences of the imperial form of warmaking; certainly not in an interdependent world. MAGA’s global vision refuses to acknowledge the deep economic inter-penetration of the capitalist world-system that ought to induce in Washington a measure of prudent restraint, caution. Instead, Trump has succumbed to the imperialist impulse to illegally and unconstitutionally bomb country after country. Joke’s on us, because it turns out one of those countries has a military strategy capable of inducing a global financial crisis and controlling a key strategic chokepoint—the Strait of Hormuz. This is the very reason past imperial presidencies didn’t bomb Iran, whatever their other crimes. It would visit pain on Americans in ways too undeniable to obfuscate.

Americans have been suffering in many ways for years. But even the most Bravo TV-addled minds know that the burgeoning fuel and food crisis is the consequence of the gratuitously elective Iran War. Trump has violated the first rule of imperial warmaking.

To be sure, much of the world will suffer worse than the average American. But it’s the ruling class’s strange indifference to the world’s suffering that ensures the American people too will suffer. Because the world is connected after all.

Hey, friend! You might have noticed that I’m offering more of Un-Diplomatic without the paywall; I’m trying to keep as much as possible public. But to do that requires your help because Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported. As we experiment with keeping our content paywall-free, please consider the less than $2 per week it takes to keep this critical analysis going.

Keep it going!

If each instance of my writing is a way to process and think deeply about one specific thing, then the podcasting is a way to reassemble the individual problems I spend time thinking about back into a messy texture that requires engagement as a whole. Podcasting brings the vibes back in, without losing the hot takes.

In this week’s episode of the pod, accordingly, I cover a lot of ground:

• America’s war in Iran is creating a casualty gap that widens the gulf between the military’s enlisted and officer class.

• As the costs of the Iran war mount, most of the world remains distracted from America’s illegal blockade of Cuba—an act of war.

• The oil crisis is already fueling a food crisis, which is going to sow revolutionary conditions around the world.

• Imperialism does and doesn’t help explain the US bombing a dairy farm in Ecuador.

• Pete Hegseth’s pastor praying for the death of Texas senate candidate James Talarico signals a wave of far right violence that will confront the victories of left populist democrats in 2026 and 2028.

• Tracking the latest in the Iran war reveals just how much we're experiencing epistemic collapse—did Iran even fire missiles at Diego Garcia?

Catch the episode wherever you get podcasts, or watch on YouTube.

Hey, friend! You might have noticed that I’m offering more of Un-Diplomatic without the paywall; I’m trying to keep as much as possible public. But to do that requires your help because Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported. As we experiment with keeping our content paywall-free, please consider the less than $2 per week it takes to keep this critical analysis going.

Keep it going!

ICYMI:

You might know Morgan Spector as the critically acclaimed leading man in The Gilded Age and The Plot Against America. Or for his appearances in Boardwalk Empire, Suits, Homeland, How to Make It In America (one of my favorites),1 or even as a producer on The Big Scary “S” Word. What you might not know is that Morgan is both an impressive critic of policy and an advocate for democratic socialism.

On my other show, The Bang-Bang Podcast, we invited Morgan on to talk about Independence Day (1996), a delicious conversation that’s forthcoming. But we also recorded an in-depth installment of “Politics Behind the Scenes,” an occasional side-convo with guests of Bang-Bang, about the urgent real-world issues of the day.

In this special episode, which is also being released as a crossover drop on The Un-Diplomatic Podcast, my co-host Lyle Rubin and I chop it up with Morgan about:

• Meaningful anti-imperialist positions on Russia’s war withUkraine;

• Framing the Iran war;

• Nationalizing the defense industry and taking the profits out of war;

• How we might envision a peace economy;

• Why we all love Graham Platner;

• The Israel problem in US foreign policy;

• Why we’re bullish on electoral leftism; and

• How the Democratic Party has shit the bed so bad that left populists have a real opportunity to takeover the party from within.

A lot going on here. You don’t want to miss this episode with one of Hollywood’s best political minds:

Bang-Bang

The Anti-Imperialist Opportunity w/ Morgan Spector | Ep. 63

You might know Morgan Spector as the critically acclaimed leading man in The Gilded Age and The Plot Against America. Or for his appearances in Boardwalk Empire, Suits, Homeland, How to Make It In America (one of Van’s favorites), or even as a producer on…

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a month ago · 4 likes · Van and Lyle are Bang-Bang

Hey, friend! You might have noticed that I’m offering more of Un-Diplomatic without the paywall; I’m trying to keep as much as possible public. But to do that requires your help because Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported. As we experiment with keeping our content paywall-free, please consider the less than $2 per week it takes to keep this critical analysis going.

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I’m struggling not to lose my mind. Follow me, if you dare, down a vortex of insanity.

First the US entered a war with multiple contradictory pretexts, without any kind of approval from Congress or the people. Everyone knows that. But then we learned that an Iranian strike against Bahrain was actually a detonation of a US Patriot missile. Hmm. Then the US relocated 5k Marines from Okinawa to the Middle East without explaining the purpose.

Then we’re told Iran launched two medium-range ballistic missiles 3,800km (which is technically possible) at a nuclear bomber base on Diego Garcia, only to learn that Iran denies having launched the missiles, spawning two competing theories about the missile launch: One, that there was no launch at all, and the other that Israel launched the missile as a false flag. In either case, neither the Israeli nor US government has denied that Iran launched the missile, so the media reports are impossible to sort.

It gets much weirder still.

As I went to bed on March 22 (US time), I saw four different trending headlines from stories that the US and Israel had just struck Iranian “infrastructure,” including a power plant. Four! Those headlines occurred in the context of Trump having issued a 48-hour ultimatum to Iran (to “re-open” the Strait of Hormuz) the previous day, making it seem like Trump’s threat to attack Iran’s energy infrastructure had started to be implemented.

But as I woke up on March 23 (US time), I’m greeted with stories of Trump TACO—he announces via a screenshot of a Truth Social post that he’s had good talks with Iran and that he’s going to postpone the destruction of Iranian energy infrastructure for five days.

Put aside that what Trump is threatening and/or done constitutes yet another war crime. Bracket off too that the stock market rebounded on Trump’s news, with reports of gargantuan levels of insider trading, which reminds of my hypothesis about the geopolitics of primitive accumulation. Had any Iranian power plants been struck by the US and Israel? I don’t freaking know! I can’t find verification of it anywhere, and Google’s Gemini seems to think that the US has only bombed Iranian civil infrastructure (a war crime), but not yet its energy infrastructure (a different war crime).

I track militarized violence and geopolitics as part of my vocation. I’m in the sense-making business. If I have trouble parsing what’s going on, I certainly can’t explain why it’s going on, which is normally where I excel.

The thing to worry about here is that Iran denies that any talks have been happening. Trump appears to be lying to justify backing down from his illegal war, and people don’t care because they’re just glad he’s showing signs of not doing the war anymore. The bond market appears to have won again, for now. In a perverse way, that’s a relief. There’s one scenario that averts a global financial crisis in the next 12 months, and it requires that the US and Israel simply stop the war.

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But the thing is, Trump made no promise to suspend Israeli attacks, and if Iran has not been negotiating with the Trump administration, then the Strait of Hormuz will not be open for oil and gas passage except by those who negotiate safe passage with Iran. If that’s the situation, then folks are celebrating a fake ceasefire.1

I worry that we’re going to be living in a public narrative that the war in Iran is somehow “over” while it very much continues. Other than nuclear annihilation, I can’t think of anything worse than having a war proceed while the world remains aloof to the fact of it.

And there are signs of precisely that. Not only did Politico just report that the US is in the process of assassinating Iran’s potential political leaders as they test and vet various puppets; what ceasefire? There are also a large number of flights from US military bases destined for Israel and Jordan—where they would need to be to launch a ground operation inside Iran. Such a setup is leading to some very plausible conspiracy thinking that the Trump one-sided ceasefire is just a way to quietly mobilize an invading force of some kind:

Even in the best case, Trump is mobilizing a large military force for something in the Middle East—but TBD whether it’s the futile hunt for WMD, the seizure of Kharg Island that would make US Marines cannon fodder, or some kind of Iraq-style quagmire. All bad scenarios. Meanwhile, even run-of-the-mill mainstream pundits are confident Trump’s ceasefire is minimally an attempt to calm global markets before proceeding with an invasion.2

So what is even happening, and why? The confusion compounds because, as Ken Klippenstein just reported, private companies (which are the only kind that generate news now) are collaborating with the US national security state to censor and “curate” how the news about the war is being presented. We are being lied to by our governments, and that’s to be expected, but we’re also being spun—often times unintentionally—by major news media and news wires reporting on events.

The stakes could not be higher, but we appear to be in a state of epistemic collapse. Any shared reality we can cultivate exists only within particular epistemic bubbles—as someone on Twitter, BlueSky, AND Substack Notes, I see the distance both across and within bubbles widening every day.

We exist in a highly degraded information environment. Good analysis has always been rare, but so too, now, are good facts. And that trend redounds to the benefit of tyrants.

Hey, friend! You might have noticed that I’m offering more of Un-Diplomatic without the paywall; I’m trying to keep as much as possible public. But to do that requires your help because Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported. As we experiment with keeping our content paywall-free, please consider the less than $2 per week it takes to keep this critical analysis going.

Keep it going!

There are many valid ways to make sense of the illegal Iran war:

• A case study in the limits of coercive bombing;

• The latest indicator of US hegemonic decline;

• Evidence of imperialist foreign policy;

• A signpost about drones as the “future of war”;

• Proof that MAGA ideology is imposing a “clash of civilizations” on the world;

• An example of getting chain-ganged into war by a client state;

• A price the world now has to pay for the corruption of the US political system.

At least as important as any of these angles is a warning I’ve expressed many times over the past decade: If the US insists on its own global primacy in a multipolar world, the result is reckless wars of choice that the US will almost certainly lose.

In 2024, I delivered a public address to the New Zealand Fabian Society. In it, I laid out my reasoning why pursuing American primacy in a multipolar world was going to bring us to World War III:

Primacy is a strategy that seeks security in a predatory way—it tries to preserve and prolong an extreme imbalance of power…for those of us who take our image of America from the long unipolar moment…we’ve taken for granted that American primacy is always in the background and not especially onerous or dangerous…

But times change. Technology changes. Distributions of power shift. Political economy has shifted…What I’m saying is that it was easy to believe that primacy was a global public good when Uncle Sugar had all the power and there were not even imagined alternatives. But that’s not the world we live in now.

To clarify key terms here, primacy is a strategy that seeks to hoard power in the extreme, even using force and global policing to ensure it retains a favorable imbalance of power. Polarity refers to the global distribution of material power. The distribution of power can be understood as unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar and each makes certain forms of world-political ordering possible/impossible. Hegemony is a form of political ordering solely compatible with a unipolar distribution of power, which is what a primacy strategy seeks to preserve and impose.

The world today is obviously multipolar. It should be beyond question that the world is multipolar now. Occasionally a scholar disputes that, and US policymakers act as if it’s not, but there’s too much evidence in favor it. That necessarily means US hegemony is a defunct project, incompatible with the world’s actually existing distribution of power. Which Canada’s prime minister recently declared (two decades too late) with much fanfare.

But this whole thing about multipolarity and primacy is not abstract. It’s very real shit with real consequences, and those consequences are currently taking the form of the illegal war with Iran. I don’t want to get bogged down in a measurement controversy that loses site of reality, so let me ground my assertions here in something that most scholars and the public simply don’t grasp: There has been a technological shift toward precision-guided munitions (PGMs, drones and missiles) over the past 30 years. It’s a global shift that the US spearheaded. And it makes every clever military capable of cheaply countering traditional techniques of power projection.

This matters because the US way of war—guided by primacist ambitions—requires global power projection. The US remains more than capable of winning wars to defend the continental United States, and it might even be able to win some imperialist adventures in Central America, given the geography. But the further away from the homeland US forces get, the more intrinsically sketchy the proposition of “victory” becomes.

Some call this military-technical shift a “revolution in military affairs,” but I think it’s better understood as a shift toward a multipolar distribution of global power. And we’re seeing what that looks like in two aspects of Iran’s military strategy.

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The first is the ease with which a highly degraded Iranian military has been able to exercise control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Using precision-guided munitions (drones and short-range missiles), Iran struck only 16 ships and was able to declare itself in control of the Strait, holding at risk enemy ships and allowing safe passage of ships that met their terms (which were, incidentally, denominating transactions in Chinese Yuan, thereby routing around US dollar supremacy, which has historically been a pillar of US primacy). Without PGMs, Iran could not exercise control over the Strait. It could not degrade US air defenses. It could not harass US ships. It’s all counter to American power projection and anathema to American primacy.

The second aspect of Iranian military strategy that illustrates the price of primacy under conditions of multipolarity is the latest news: Iran launched two intermediate-range ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, a base that hosts US B-52 nuclear-capable bombers some 3,800km away.1 As Israeli Chief of Staff Zamir just reported:

Yesterday, Iran launched a two-stage intercontinental ballistic missile [should say IRBM] with a range of 4,000 kilometers toward an American target on Diego Garcia Island. These missiles are not intended to strike Israel. Their range reaches European capitals—Berlin, Paris, and Rome are all within direct threat range.

“These missiles are not intended to strike Israel” is right. They’re intended to hold at-risk outside powers who have enough hubris to project power from far away lands into the Middle East. The US can’t fight from standoff range with impunity if enemy IRBMs can potentially hit something as strategically valuable as B-52 bomber bases 3,800km away.

The world is awash in drones, missiles, sensors, lasers, and GPS technology. That fundamentally affects the ability to “dominate” and changes what kind of politics are possible. The technological landscape has shifted the distribution of power in concrete ways.

My point is this: America’s share of global power is less than at any point since the Cold War. The reality of multipolarity does not permit US primacy, even though that’s unambiguously what the United States continues to pursue. The US can adapt to multipolarity peacefully, or it can fight in (and probably lose) high-casualty wars.

As Kenneth Waltz warned back in 1997, statesmen:

are free to do any fool thing they care to, but are likely to be rewarded for behavior that is responsive to structural pressures and punished for behavior that is not.

The United States truly is doing any fool thing it cares to. And it’s being punished accordingly.

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