Depending on when you discovered my writing or one of my shows, you may not know that I was a fairly prominent defense intellectual on the Asia beat who, over the course of Trump 1.0, got radicalized against imperialism.

Much of what you see from me these days has the conviction that there are tremendous stakes in being wrong about national security and its politics…and that almost everyone in the mainstream (including my old self) is wrong. The manic pace at which I spill ink and spit fire, though, comes from an immense feeling of guilt, even shame, about the blood-soaked imperialist project I lent my voice and brainpower to for over a decade. Writing (and podcasting) is part of my penance.

What very few people know is that I came to political consciousness in part because I reached an intellectual dead end thinking about the world like a national-security strategist. There’s more I should say about that another time, but I realized the conventional way of thinking about international security was at once full of contradictions and demonstrably self-defeating.

All of that is very personal prelude to a discussion about a radical new proposal to transform America’s military role in Asia that is upsetting much of official Washington. Among its recommendations:

• End US alliances with South Korea, Japan, Australia, and the Philippines;

• Drastically cut US military presence in East Asia;

• Declare a non-intervention policy on Taiwan; and

• Shift US military strategy from defending a “first-island chain” defense perimeter to the “second-island chain.”

This is quite an important text to critically engage with. So in the latest episode of The Un-Diplomatic Podcast, I explain and evaluate the report’s recommendations on their own terms but don’t stop there. I also specify my rubric for progressive, anti-militarist foreign policy and address the report from that perspective too. Any “progressive foreign policy” worthy of the name must focus on:

• Root causes of insecurity;

• Treat military threats as symptoms of those root causes; and

• Decide what to do consistent with a principle of least harm.

That’s the standard that we should hold ourselves (and politicians) to, and that’s the perspective I take when engaging with the report’s recommendations.

Because of the unusual nature of this episode and the report I’m discussing, I have a full transcript of the episode below (for patrons).

Also this episode: Why the 1995 Michael Moore comedy Canadian Bacon explains the US fixation with colonizing Canada in 2026.

And in the back half of the episode: A mini-lecture on imperialist accounts of World War One, comparing how W.E.B. Du Bois and V.I. Lenin both theorized empire as the cause of World War One but in starkly different ways.

Transcript for Ep. 219 of The Un-Diplomatic Podcast:

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A few years back, I wrote a piece reflecting on how I experienced 9/11 as a junior enlisted airman studying Korean at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA. Originally published both at Inkstick Media and the Duck of Minerva, I’m re-sharing it here in its entirety, below.

The thing it captures that keeps gnawing at me is how the declaration of a national security crisis—and the focus on having a foreign enemy—transformed American democracy, the military itself and, for a while, me too. I hope it hits you some type of way. ✌️

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I was an enlisted Airman studying Korean at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, California on September 11, 2001. When the first two planes struck, none of us had any idea whether it was a high-profile accident or an attack. It was only when a third plane flew into the Pentagon that we put 2 and 2 together.

I remember feeling confused, and a bit queasy after going out to the “Day Room” to check out the news, but I had a milestone language test that morning and was trying to focus.

After the test, I went outside to a smoke pit to wait for the others in my cohort to finish. I didn’t smoke but I wanted to talk to someone about what was happening and there were a couple Marines from my class already there.

They were rabid. It was the first time I’d heard anti-Arab epithets. I was still bewildered. “I just can’t believe this is happening. Who did it? Think we’re at war?” I asked. At first, both Marines sat there for a moment, as if deaf, before the first one blurted out, “Doesn’t matter. We’re gonna find out and f–k ’em up. Chop their f–king heads off.”

The 9/11 terrorist attacks marked an instant shift in what it meant to be in the military, and at DLI.

Overnight, the almost college-like campus transformed from an open one that anyone could pass through to a locked down army post with check points and concertina wire everywhere. The culture shifted too. Soon, it seemed like everybody was talking and acting like those Marines. Eventually, I was sharing in the righteous anger too.

There was a lot of peer pressure to embrace a patriotism that required performative militarism and masculinity (at least for those of us in uniform). It was our job to protect the nation, and we were just attacked. And our Commander-in-Chief had promised we’d be getting our revenge, in so many words. We were feeding off of each others’ manic energy in a way that mirrored some accounts I’ve read of the mania of the Cultural Revolution in China.

It’s embarrassing but essential to acknowledge that the soundtrack of my final months at DLI was the song “Draft Me!” by Canibus, which dropped maybe a month after 9/11. In fact, I didn’t catch up to the psychology of my emotional peers until that song. Canibus had been one of my favorite lyricists in high school, partly because he rapped about ideas, partly because he lit up LL Cool J in one of the best diss tracks of all time. For me, Canibus was the ultimate validation that the War on Terror must be righteous. The song was a hyper-patriotic, racist ode to murder on behalf of nationalism. The hook went:

Draft me! I wanna fight for my country, jump in a humvee and murder those monkeys! Draft me! I’m too dedicated to fail. Justice must prevail.

It gets even more contemptible than that, but you get the flavor of the cultural moment we were living through. Looking back, the obvious problem wasn’t just that dissent was deemed unpatriotic, which is easy enough to acknowledge. It was the unique way that nationalist militarism appeared to be the golden ticket for escaping minority oppression.

Suge Knight, founder of Death Row records, spoke to the zeitgeist, noting the following year,

we’re supporting the USA…there’s no such thing as ghetto, middle class, or rich. There’s only the United States.

Of course, the ghetto remained. The middle class was reserved for people who owned real estate or worked for the rapidly expanding national security state. And the rich got richer. But supporting the War on Terror — and more importantly being seen to support the War on Terror — gave you access to American identity, community. The “hegemony of nationhood” was constructed with the bribery of social inclusion after centuries of ostracism and persecution.

Hip-hop had always been the music of the oppressed, bearing witness to the parts of the American story that were too incongruous for polite society to acknowledge. In the ’90s though, the genre gradually hollowed out its spiritual radicalism as dissent music in favor of greed-is-good individualism. Don’t hate the player, hate the game. Can’t knock the hustle. All of that.

The neoliberal evolution of hip-hop before 9/11 defanged its critique of power, drew attention away from injustice. There were “conscious” rappers like and Mos Def, but the industry as a whole had become nihilistic. That meant rappers were largely freed from the possibility of contradiction when 9/11 struck.

In a previous era, it would’ve been criminal to side with the state, especially one waging global war. Now it was the surest path to mainstream acceptance.

Like most of us, hip-hop hasn’t reckoned with its quiescence in the consolidation and expansion of state power after 9/11. Unlike most of us though, hip-hop was uniquely the voice of the voiceless. It nurtured the dissent culture that, thankfully, has started making a comeback.

But by joining the War on Terror, even if only for a brief time, hip-hop helped to utterly neuter dissent in America. Never again.

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I just read a great post informing me that sales for non-fiction books have fallen off a cliff. Of course, reading in general has swan-dived; I see it in the classroom, I hear about it on podcasts, etc etc. But within that trend, fiction is now selling more favorably than non-fiction, which reverses the historical norm.

The decades-long trend against reading has always put a pit in my stomach. So, initially, I was especially dismayed at the news that non-fiction sales have become such shit. I write non-fiction for a living, and I have to imagine that all of you who read this are also non-fiction readers, which means you might share my sense of dread about the state of (non-)reading.

But I thought about it as I went about my day, returning to the issue only as I sat down in the evening, belly full, kid asleep, dogs walked, glowing box displaying forgettable content in the background.

I’m not sure this non-fiction trend heralds anything new, or at least it’s not a distinct kind of problem threatening democracy.

One way of understanding the decline of non-fiction is as the shrinking market for specifically airport bookstore slop. I think back to how much crap I read from about 2000 to 2018—The World is Flat, Freakonomics, books uncritically explaining terrorism and the Iraq war… Millions of words that amounted to justifying the status quo. There were some gems, of course, but the ratio of bad to good was lopsided, and if it was on the New York Times bestseller list, it typically had the effect of numbing—rather than activating—my critical thinking capacities.

Why is reading a virtue? Because it thickens your humanity, activates your political consciousness, expands your awareness of what has been and what could be. How many best-sellers in 2025 do that? Do Tim Marshall and Robert Kaplan books about why geography is a primordial reason for us to slaughter our fellow humans plausibly do any of that? Do Malcolm Gladwell’s pop social-science texts?

Just as bad, most of what appears on non-fiction bestseller lists the past 20 years is celebrity slop anyway, which just happens to also appear at airport bookstores. What do we gain from leadership lessons by Matthew McConaughey or Gwyneth Paltrow? Are self-exculpating memoirs ghostwritten on behalf of failed politicians making us smarter or expanding our emotional reservoir? Increasingly, the big advances and the big marketing campaigns that generate big sales are, with precious few exceptions, limited to celebrities with big audiences and nothing to say.

That ain’t me or anyone I know.

For those of us doing the public intellectual thing without influencer-level fame, nothing much has changed. It’s always been hard to get the attention of an editor at a publishing house, and, in my lifetime, the advances on royalties have never been enough to live on, assuming you’re lucky enough to secure an advance.

But academic and indie publishing is still doing its thing. Some of the best books I’ve ever read were published in the last decade…you’d just never find them at an airport or on a bestseller list.

For sure, a society incapable of deep reading will struggle to defend itself against demagogues and despots. But that’s a decades-long problem in the making, accelerated by the AI investment bubble that could not froth without most of the people lamenting reading’s decline in The Atlantic thinking the bubble is a worthwhile risk in order to beat China in the AI race in their minds.

The non-fiction list has too much crap on it. Spending money to read what’s on it has become a class signifier for a rapidly shrinking class. After all, if you want to read crap, you can scroll Substack Notes for free.

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When I kicked around the DC think-tank scene, I worked with several younger guys I really related to even though I was a notch higher than them in the pecking order. Every Washingtonian in their 20s aspires to suit-and-tie life and they were no different, showing up for work everyday dressed for the job they wanted.

One, in particular, was just a very amenable dude; rational, liberal, go along to get along. All traits that helped him climb the ladder, eventually work in the Biden administration, and walk out the revolving door into a much higher position than when he’d entered government. When I knew him, we bonded over rap—Tupac, Lupe Fiasco, Run The Jewels.

Like everyone in our circle, we assumed preserving and growing state power—global primacy—was good for the world and therefore necessary. We were trained to believe that when it came to using force to murder others, we should be “giving the president more options.” And we took American exceptionalism for granted, which meant that no crime of our government, no failure of judgment, could ever wash away the good intentions of our elite community managing state power. How to square all that with loving Conscious Hip-Hop is something I’m still trying to figure out…

At any rate, if you pointed out to us the real harm foreign policy was causing, we had three moves (assuming we didn’t just ignore you). We would dissemble, which is to say we’d out-argue you on technicalities that amounted to whataboutism or blaming the harm on others. We would justify harm as worth whatever abstract upside we attributed to foreign policy—“the world would fall into chaos if US troops weren’t in Germany and Japan.” Or we would claim fecklessness, agreeing with you in spirit—“I hear ya, buddy!”—but shrugging with our hands up; nothing we can do about genocide or forever wars.

It took years (and distance) to finger my discomfort with this way of thinking and being. You cannot exist among well-educated people with impressive-sounding titles embodying the soulless ideology of national power and spitting a vocabulary of vacuous buzzwords without becoming like them. Practice makes habit. You are what you do repeatedly.

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Given all that, I’m unsure what’s the greater miracle—that I could detect the swamp’s noxious gases poisoning me before it was too late, or that I found a way out of this bland fanaticism at all. What I do know is that I eventually had a premonition of where national security think-tank life was leading and it had me running in the other direction like the Final Girl in a horror flick. Everyone was confused by how swiftly I got out of DC once a window opened, but they hadn’t known my inner life or how I came up.

I’m haunted now by the ghost of futures past when I see friends from my old world. Not a week goes by that they’re not debasing themselves at the altar of power, (wilfully?) aloof at the sacrifices of real people for this abstraction called “national security” they so venerate. Sock puppets for not just capital but the war-profiteering and Big Tech sections of capital.

Would’ve been me if I’d stuck around Washington. It was me in a previous era, when empire’s mask hadn’t entirely fallen off.

So my gut stirs with melancholy and rage and survivor’s guilt when I see this week that an old friend—who could quote Tupac bar for bar—publicly argued that the US should be: pouring ungodly amounts of capital into AI; trying to “win” an AI rivalry with China; and stealing China’s superior technology if it gets close to inventing “artificial general intelligence.” And if nothing else works, he suggested, the US should prepare to conduct both cyberattacks and kinetic (bombing) attacks against Chinese AI infrastructure.

America must win, whatever that means, whatever that costs. Domination laundered through technocracy.

I’m repulsed. I struggle to suppress my emotions on social media, writing vicious Tweets that I never post, because I recognize the template here. Deep down, I know I would’ve made precisely this argument had I stayed on the road I was on. I made arguments like it in the mid-2010s.

By Washington standards, the bro I’m gesturing to is one of the more rational voices on foreign policy. So was I. He certainly doesn’t think of himself as a jingo. Neither did I.

And that’s what should worry you who reads this: One of the sane people in the room is thinking through, giving the president options for, and socializing the public to the prospect of launching a preventive war against China. There are many like him, and there are many more still who are much worse. And if a vanilla, progressive-except-for-primacy Democrat somehow manages to win the White House, they will rule again. In certain ways, they’re ruling now.

But Tupac had a word for those who lend their voices to the already powerful; those who are “blind to the fact,” as he liked to say, that they’re promoting a mix of neocolonialism and preventive war because it’s good for the corrupt sections of capital that fund their think tank. “Bitch-made.”

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Why “purging immigrants” doesn’t fix working-class wages—it’s a wealth story, not a race story.

I joined New Zealand’s student-led “School Strike 4 Climate” in Wellington. The movement’s demands have evolved from narrow climate asks toward linking climate justice with broader political education and youth voter enrollment.

The White House’s official website is hosting deportation-themed arcade games—fascism makes cruelty a spectacle.

Trump’s social media post depicting US “territories” was a colonial confession—he sees Guam, Puerto Rico, CNMI, Washington DC, Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia all as US colonial holdings…plus a jab claiming the Strait of Hormuz as American territory.

The Economist magazine had embarrassing coverage of Australia’s Pacific security agreements, which are asymmetric “protectorate” deals that expand Australian sub-imperial influence and destabilize the region more than any Chinese military presence does.

A new chart shows that ICE raid-heavy states have seen the slowest wage growth...and that requires a little explainer about fascism, counter-revolution, and who benefits from ethnonationalism (oligarchs!). Labor’s declining share of national income—not immigration—is driving economic insecurity.

Non-sequitur: Hulu’s Furious might be the best show on streaming right now.

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

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“Bogan,” in Australian slang, refers to someone who is of low culture, crude, unsophisticated. But it can be a term of endearment or a badge of honor depending on the context.

I went on Bogan Intelligentsia, a podcast in Australia with a rare independent voice about world politics. In the case of that show, “bogan” is a colorful way of referring to the working class. Bogan Intelligentsia, then, implies what Antonio Gramsci would have understood as an organic intellectual of the working class.

In this episode, we get very critical about both US and Australian foreign policy (our references to pegging and ball gags might be too crude for some, but it gets the point across…and nothing is cruder than the wage theft and militarized violence we criticize).

We explore why Trump is trying to colonize Canada (I’m writing an essay about that now), and how Mark Carney is responding to American domination more intelligently than either Australia or New Zealand.

We also talk about some of the pathologies of how Washington thinks about foreign policy, and whether there’s any hope of reform or redemption from within the Democratic Party.

And in the back end of the episode, we talk about the concept of multipolarity—specifically how neocons, MAGA, and Biden liberals all think differently about multipolarity and what it means.

The episode is available wherever you get your podcasts, or you can watch on YouTube.

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What has been the tech oligarch playbook for labor repression, why have tech billionaires mutated into oligarchs, and how does far-right culture-war politics benefit the oligarchic class?

How did Kickstarter become the first company to unionize in the tech sector and what made it almost unique?

How has labor organizing of tech workers changed from the early 2010s to today?

And what makes exercising worker power in the tech sector unique compared to workers in the economy at large?

JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine join me to discuss their incredible new book, Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry.

Also this episode:

• The Trump administration designates Palestine Action a global terrorist organization;

• Fascist geopolitics propels the US toward trying to annex Canada;

• CIA operations in Mexico; and

• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announces an economic “D-Day” threat on Iran that he can’t fully implement.

Buy the book, Against Tech Oligarchy

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

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Why does the United States keep waging one bullshit war after another? Especially when it can’t seem to win any of them?

No answer would be complete without grasping the pathologies of the national security state. Technocrats, military officers, and think-tankers form a highly indoctrinated class that thinks of itself as non-ideological. But their ideology is a self-exculpating alchemy of brute force and American exceptionalism that redounds to the benefit of American oligarchs.

This ideology of national security is why, for more than 40 years, Democratic, Republican, and MAGA presidencies alike have pursued primacy whether they referred to it that way (many have) or not. Some have emphasized international institutions. Others have venerated allies. Some have prioritized the Middle East and civilizational conflict. Others Asia and great-power war. But all have pursued primacy.

What is primacy?

It is an ideal-type grand strategy of domination that presupposes—and tries to preserve—global military superiority. In one of the classic-but-not-good works on grand strategy, primacy was defined this way:

Primacy holds that only a preponderance of power ensures peace…an imbalance of power…Primacy is most concerned with the trajectories of present and possible future great powers…Advocates of primacy view the rise of a peer competitor…to offer the greatest threat to international order…The objective of primacy, therefore, is…to preserve U.S. supremacy.

From this we can distill primacy as a strategy with three attributes:

• It requires an extreme imbalance of power in the world-system favoring the US;

• It prioritizes rising great powers as the foremost threat to the state; and

• It insists on using force to contain or diminish even hypothetical challenges to US supremacy.

That is what US policymakers have been committed to since at least the Reagan years.

For most of the “unipolar moment,” the primacy strategy was explicit. But from the Biden presidency to now, some national-security bros (and lady bros) have been in denial about the primacist character of what they advocate—an indication that they’re unaware of the very project they’re complicit in carrying out. The objective standard for diagnosing a primacy strategy (the three attributes above) is useful for precisely this reason; it helps us know the national-security bro better than he knows himself.

By conflating hard power with security, and allowing nationalism to infect his analysis of the world, the national-security bro cannot inquire about who benefits from US foreign policy; cannot accept responsibility for anything that goes wrong in the world; cannot comprehend that military preparedness and warmaking does little more than manage the contradictions inherent to capitalism.

As I wrote in 2023:

One must squint quite hard to discern a theory of stability in a strategy that demands a favorable imbalance of military power, the active proliferation of weapons platforms, and muscle flexing in the name of signaling resolve.

The problem with primacy is that it is at once a self-regarding, self-exculpating, and self-defeating way of relating to the world:

Even if U.S. primacy was once a source of regional stability, there is little basis to think it will promote harmony today. The United States’ global power has diminished over the past generation, making it harder for Washington to direct the world. Other states have a newfound desire and capacity to resist, subvert, lash out against, or seek alternatives to U.S. preferences, including through violence. And the power of these countries is likely to continue to grow. It defies history to expect that dusk will never come for U.S. hegemony…

I have to frame all of this in terms of the ideology of national security because only that ideology—and the pathology of power it contains—could systematically prevent successive generations of well-educated people with mid-to-no fashion sense from seeing the most basic fact about international relations in the 21st century: The global distribution of power makes primacy impossible. The national-security state conceives of a role for itself in the world that bears little resemblance to how the world today actually works.

That’s why the Houthis could fight the US to a draw. That’s why the US could bluster into war with Iran. That’s why the US finds itself short on ammunition (of all things!). And that’s why the US will keep fighting bullshit wars anyway.

The mode of statecraft must match the moment in which it engages. America’s share of global power is less than at any point since the Cold War. Our world is multipolar; the unipolar moment is over. And yet, primacy is a strategy that is only possible in a unipolar world. To pursue primacy anyway is to invite arms races and military misadventures until we’re all dead.

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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Did you catch the latest episode of The Bang-Bang Podcast, where we discuss Inglorious Basterds (2009) while diagnosing America’s geopolitical folly?

Bang-Bang

Inglourious Basterds (2009) w/ Carlos Hogan | Ep. 74

In Afghanistan in 2010, most frontline units Lyle spent time with had at least one Jewish Marine, and every one of them was nicknamed Bear Jew. That’s the reach this movie had with the war-on-terror generation, and this episode is about what that reach meant. Carlos Hogan, a former Air Force intelligence officer and the newest of the show’s rotating bench of fellow veterans, grew up bonding with his Apache-pilot dad over Aldo Raine quotes and brought this film to the show…

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21 days ago · 3 likes · Van and Lyle are Bang-Bang

• Why are US troops in South Korea? I talk about my history working Korea policy, and why I’m skeptical about the old rationale for troops holding up in 2026.

• There’s a bond market crisis that could spark a financial meltdown—here’s why interest rates are rising.

• The real meaning of the Pentagon’s announcement to produce 200,000 drones for “drone dominance.”

• With Alexander Vindman’s loss to Angie Nixon in the Florida senate primary, we are seeing the twighlight of the “resistance liberal” from Trump 1.0. The politics of national security are changing and Washington is going to be the last to realize it.

• Could party structures modeled on DSA emerge in other countries?

Also this episode (in the back half): My panel discussion about left populism, democratic socialism, and the upcoming New Zealand election at the NZ Fabian Society.

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

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The New Zealand Fabian Society hosted a timely panel last night with me, Ollie Neas of Public Interest, and Bryce Edwards of the Democracy Project.

New Zealand has an election coming in November and the country’s left parties are at once positioning themselves to win and studying the rise of left populism in other rich countries—especially in the US. To that end, we had an extended discussion about class politics at the end of history, what left populism even is, and everything you ever wanted to know about the Democratic Socialists of America. You can watch the entire event here:

The transcript of my written remarks (not the Q&A discussion) appears below.

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Remarks to the New Zealand Fabian Society

19 August 2026, as delivered

Everyone probably knows who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) is. She’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, she’s a congresswoman representing the Bronx in New York, and there’s a decent chance that she’s America’s next president.

But AOC went to Germany a few months ago and gave this great talk about left populism. She said something like

When you have economic stagnation for the working class…that is the stuff of populist movements. The choice is what direction those populist movements can go.

That’s a great starting point because Left and Right populism are similar only in fingering the failure of normal liberal politics to keep the working class secure and enfranchised and alive. But identifying the pain of the working class is where the comparison between left and right populism stops.

Because right populism tells a story about workers being screwed—which is the reality—but it’s a story that blames everything on vulnerable populations. Immigrants, Muslims, trans kids, Chinese people.

That content doesn’t compare to left populism in any way at all. Left populism tells a story about workers getting screwed because that’s the material reality you’re starting from. But it’s not a story about cultural grievance or identity politics—it’s a story about class. The working class.

I think if you’re a centrist or someone who’s not especially attuned to the shape of our historical moment, you might be inclined to treat left and right populists as somehow equivalent.

But that’s a huge mistake, and not just because I’m on one side versus the other. The mistake is an analytical one: If the story of your politics professes to diagnose a problem and propose a solution, it must also account for who within society is benefiting from the problem.

This is the failure of far-right populism that exposes it as a farce—the people and systems it blames to deflect from the economic precarity of the working class is not the people or systems who thrive in conditions of economic precarity. It’s those at top of the k-shaped economy that obviously benefit from the fact of a k-shaped economy.

And there aren’t a lot of immigrants and trans kids at the top of the economy—there’s a rentier class, there’s a class of lobbyists, military contractors, venture capital and private equity firms, and, in New Zealand, a grocery store duopoly that price gouges me every time I buy chicken nuggets and apples.

We can name all of that as oligarchy—because oligarchy is the politics of wealth hoarding or wealth defense. And because the power of the state in rich countries—including New Zealand—functions foremost to protect wealth…we’re being dominated by oligarchic politics. By those at the top of the k-shaped economy.

So in the US, where inequality trends are visibly more extreme than in New Zealand but just a few years ahead of us, we see in the US the ghost of Christmas future. And that’s something we can learn from.

In the US, “left-populism” describes a big tent with multiple tendencies—progressives, radlibs, and of course the rise of DSA. And there’s more to say about that, especially DSA, but the left populists, regardless of their tendency, are all running on three core issues:

• Against militarism and genocide;

• Against data centers and Big Tech;

• Against oligarchy.

And how politicians talk about those three sets of issues involves tailoring a unique home style. If you’re Mamdani, maybe you talk about unaffordability instead of oligarchy. If you’re Ro Khanna, maybe you talk about the Epstein class instead of oligarchy. And then of course Bernie Sanders talks primarily about oligarchy. Home styles will vary. And in some districts, you’re going to message heavily on only one or two of these things…but the novelty of what’s happening is that it’s a package deal. For the first time in my lifetime, you get a coherent platform that everyone from this part of the political spectrum endorses regardless of how they emphasize or de-emphasize parts of it.

By way of an example, my friend Will Lawrence won the Democratic nomination for Congress in Michigan two weeks ago. And there’s a few really noteworthy things about his campaign. One, he’s been a democratic socialist as long as I’ve known him, and he won in Michigan, a purple state, anyway. Two, the two competitors he beat were credentialed national-security professionals—one was a navy SEAL and the other was Biden’s ambassador to Ukraine.

That’s ruptural. In my adult life, ever since the War on Terror began, national-security credentials used to be sufficient to win in electoral politics and now it’s discrediting. Literally today the golden child of the national security state, Alex Vindman, got beat by a democratic socialist in Florida, for Marco Rubio’s senate seat! We’re experiencing a paradigm shift.

And my buddy Will won by making his entire campaign about being against data centers and Flock surveillance cameras and being for community control…But you look at Will’s platform, it’s the entire left-populist agenda—he also wants to cut aid to Israel, he opposes billionaires, he wants to cut the defense budget and opposes illegal wars, he wants free buses and a peace economy at home. He wants to demilitarize Michigan industry.

So when you get a left-populist politician, you get a coherent package of policies that respond to the suffering of the working class. I think that’s not just necessary; it’s smart politics. And it’s not sufficiently in evidence in New Zealand party politics and we need to explore why that might be.

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The logic of US troops in South Korea has become threadbare.

You might’ve seen that Trump just announced a reduction in US military exercises in Korea, hinting that it’s really because South Korea would not join America’s illegal, inflationary, imperialist war against Iran:

This triggers many thoughts about a subject I’ve tried to avoid the past several years.

People knew me as a “Korea hand” before they knew me as anything else. I started life as a Korean linguist in the Air Force. I was stationed in South Korea, twice. I was the director for Korea policy in Obama’s Pentagon. I’ve written more about North Korea than I care to remember.

During all that time, I reflexively defended the US-South Korea alliance and all that came with it…US boots on the ground, military exercises, and nonstop talk of “deterrence.”

But I knew, and occasionally said publicly, that the US military presence was not keeping North Korea from invading the South. We often spoke of “deterrence”—ie, the threat implied by our presence prevented the renewed outbreak of war. But that hadn’t been true since the 1970s and even most war hawks have been willing to acknowledge that North Korea has been too desperate economically and inwardly focused politically to gamble its existence on a futile war against a technologically superior South.

The truth is, since the Obama years, the US presence in Korea has served two-and-a-half purposes:

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I’ll be appearing on a panel hosted by The New Zealand Fabian Society in a couple days. The event will be live-streamed (above), and you can attend for free in person if you happen to be in Wellington.

About the Event

What should a politics that works for the majority look like in New Zealand? What can it borrow from left-populist movements around the world? And how might left-populist policy agendas impact on the New Zealand election? This panel discussion with Dr. Bryce Edwards, Dr. Van Jackson, and Oliver Neas will assess New Zealand’s political landscape for signs of left populism, distinguish it from “far-right populism,” and explore the reasons for popular demands against wealth concentration and for material improvements in living and working conditions at home and abroad.

About the Panelists

Van Jackson is an Associate Professor at Victoria University of Wellington, where he specializes in peace studies and the class politics of geopolitics. Jackson is host of The Un-Diplomatic Podcast and author of The Un-Diplomatic Newsletter, as well as five books on international relations, including the book The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy (Yale University Press, Jan. 2025) and Grand Strategies of the Left: The Foreign Policy of Progressive Worldmaking (Cambridge University Press, Dec. 2023). Dr Bryce Edwards hosts the Democracy Project, producing daily media links and frequent articles. Ollie Neas is a lawyer and Managing Editor of Public Interest, an independent media organisation from Aotearoa New Zealand dedicated to making sense of the world in an age of political uncertainty.

Registration

When: August 19th, 2026 from 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM (NZT)

Location: 2/57 Willis St (Via the lifts at the back of Unity Books), Wellington

Register for free here

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ICYMI:

Marco Rubio’s stolen hip-hop valor. He might claim that Tupac is his favorite rapper, but Tupac would’ve hated everything Rubio stands for.

Some undiplomatic thoughts about Tyler Austin Harper’s viral essay in The Atlantic about leaving academia out of frustration at being a “Token Black Professor.” I don’t exactly agree with his critiques of the “woke” university system, but it’s an opportunity to reflect on what’s even at stake in the culture wars.

A new story exposes the plight of students at my university skipping meals and classes because they can’t afford life. The problem is growing, I see it up close everyday, and it’s only going to get worse in a k-shaped economy.

In the back half of the episode, I speak with Robbie Shilliam—one of the most prominent postcolonial scholars today—about international relations’ racial reckoning since the BLM uprisings of 2020. We also discuss:

• What made Hans Morgenthau a theorist of race relations, not just international relations;

• Why the field of IR has a racial blind spot in the first place;

• Why IR’s leading journals, editors, and scholars re-engaged racial questions after 2020 but without drawing on what the discipline’s own canonical thinkers had to say about race (much of which was bad and warrants critical engagement);

• Why the Gen Z and Millennial generation of scholars are possibly built differently when it comes to racial issues and historical IR; and

• How the concept of “frontier” unites Republicanism and imperialism in some of the early thinkers of IR like Frederick Jackson Turner, William Allen, and Merze Tate.

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

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Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) represents the most organized section of what The Nation praised this week as a “progressive insurgency” sweeping the US. Easily one of the most consequential political shifts in my lifetime.

DSA is a power base for the kinds of policies I advocate. It complicates the simple binary of America’s two-party system in ways that are good for democracy. And it is the only political force in American politics that understands hegemonic decline as both an existential danger to the world if managed improperly and an opening to make a different kind of world.

DSA is already reshaping the Democratic Party in small ways. When we look back on the coming years, we could see the rise of DSA as either the beginning of a democratic renewal in the world’s imperial Core or the object of a MAGA-led red scare that heralded America’s total mutation into not just an oligarchy but a dictatorship.

DSA Defines The Future…

The Democratic Party will not be able to police DSA back to the margins of politics without enlisting in MAGA’s counter-revolution (which could happen).1 Alternatively, it’s possible the Democratic Party will somehow co-opt DSA’s life force like a billionaire to a blood boy…but the only conceivable way of neutering the movement is to become it; like Bismarck inventing social security in 1889.

But suggesting that DSA has a future in Democratic politics, or that it poses a real threat to far-right control of the state, assumes that whatever fuels DSA’s rise will persist. So what propels DSA toward power?

The short answer should also be the obvious one: Worsening economic immiseration, state tyranny, and reactionary political culture swells DSA’s ranks within a large left-populist wave. We can be confident of DSA’s consequentialness one way or another because the material conditions that give rise to DSA are only going to get worse in the coming years.

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The Theory

But economic insecurity and state repression explain the trend (DSA’s rise), not the variation within the trend—DSA performs better in some places (big cities) than others. That variation is the puzzle in a new journal article called “Why now, why here: a conjunctural theory of socialist advance in big city America.”

The author asks both why DSA is winning in big cities and why now as opposed to 20 years ago. He identifies four factors that help account for where and when DSA is winning, not just the general trend:

• Education-rich, housing-poor workers: The DSA base isn’t just economically precarious; it’s also highly educated. The stereotype of a barista who’s read their Marx and Gramsci has a ring of truth, but it’s not just about downward mobility or economic insecurity—they’re specifically unable to get on the property ladder in what is primarily an asset economy in high cost-of-living big cities.

• Counter-hegemonic civil society: The ability to spend time, money, labor, and leisure in ways that deviate from ruling-class hegemony (ie, mainstream politics and culture) depends on civic density: Big cities “concentrate advocacy organizations, labor unions, legal organizations, faith institutions, and philanthropic capital in dense proximity.” Dense urban areas give people and movements autonomy and resources to pursue alternative political ideas.

• Legitimation crisis: During certain conjunctures, nothing you do politically can seem to matter, and the boundaries of legitimate politics are very narrow. Challenging those boundaries can feel fruitless. The ‘90s were a bit like that. But there are moments when the door opens for a major political realignment because the old order has lost legitimacy. The New Deal Coalition. The “Southern Strategy.” We’ve been in one of those moments for a decade, held back only by AIPAC money and the Biden presidency.

• Institutional veto architecture: This factor is something DSA must overcome as it governs. The structure of American politics makes it easy for a deposed ruling class (former majority turned minority) to play a spoiler role in governing. When DSA becomes part of a majority coalition with progressive and left-liberal Dems, minority Republicans and conservative Dems will be able to stifle socialist change without much difficulty (this happened in Spain during the 2010s). And if DSA can’t perform, then the minority will find its way back to the majority.

I think this is basically right.

There is a legitimacy crisis of the ruling order, and that creates an opportunity for a once-in-a-generation political realignment.

Big cities are sites of densely concentrated activism, mixed with high levels of education mixed, with house-poor economic precarity—the perfect combination to build party cadre committed to fixing the economic plight facing the working class.

And American politics does empower savvy ousted politicians with the ability to paralyze government, thereby making a new ruling party appear ineffective.

The author summarizes his findings this way:

DSA is not winning council seats in Los Angeles because of charismatic candidates but because a decade of organizational work in tenant unions, mutual aid networks, and electoral infrastructure had already been done before any electoral opening appeared (Nicholls & Uitermark, 2016). The same logic applies in New York, where DSA’s advances from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 congressional victory through Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 mayoral campaign were built on years of prior accumulation in housing justice coalitions, democratic clubs, and labor formations. Minneapolis tells the cautionary version: the infrastructure was sufficient to produce 2020 breakthroughs but not deep enough to withstand the veto architecture of the residual regime once victories were secured. In all three cities, the decisive variable was the depth and durability of the organizational infrastructure that preceded the electoral moment, organizational depth accumulated through positional struggle meeting the conjunctural rupture produced by regime crisis.

He’s saying metropolises incubate real organizational base-building, and that organizational capacity can be favorably mobilized when the political winds blow in a favorable direction. Preparation meets opportunity.

Beyond the Theory

My only reservations relate to how the author frames his analysis: “They [DSA] are nearly absent from deindustrialized mid-sized cities, suburbs, and rural areas.” That’s not true, or at least it’s an overstatement.

Detroit is the preeminent de-industrialized city and DSA candidate Donovan McKinney just won the Democratic nomination to represent it in Congress. And while that only just happened in August 2026, Rashida Tlaib—who’s been in Congress since 2019—is also a DSA member and part of Detroit is in her district.

In Wisconsin, which four years ago had no socialist caucus in the state assembly, there are now four democratic socialists. And Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist, came within 1% of winning the Democratic nomination for governor.

In Maine, the Democratic nomination for the Senate belongs to Troy Jackson, who received the endorsement of Maine DSA.

Meanwhile, in Florida—a least-likely location for a socialist politician to thrive—DSA candidate Oliver Larkin has been in a statistical tie for most of his primary race (August 18).

In all of these places, DSA is vastly overperforming despite the areas being a mix of rural, suburban, and de-industrialized. In other words, DSA is winning more seats and getting more votes than it was a few years ago in every type of geography, even in places political math say should be impossible. At current count, nine Democratic congressional incumbents have lost their seats to this ongoing left-populist insurgency. As Ken Klippenstein points out, that’s the biggest anti-incumbent wave since 1970, and the primaries aren’t even over yet. It’s triple the right’s “Tea Party wave” during Obama’s second term.

What that means is the four factors the article identifies tell us where DSA breakthroughs are most likely, but breakthroughs can happen—and are happening—in every kind of locale. Places where DSA has built organizational capacity reap more from the harvest, but that capacity only converts to political power during certain moments that are not the product of organizational capacity building.

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The Crux of the Problem is the Opportunity

The root source of DSA’s rise is the depraved material conditions bearing down on growing numbers of unemployed, underemployed, and economically insecure (from student debt as much as from housing unaffordability). That’s also what aggravates the legitimacy crisis. We shouldn’t lose sight of that.

As for the question of why DSA’s rise did not happen 20 years ago, think about where the US was in 2005: Binging on the oppressive, manic, dizzyingly violent War on Terror, which truly was a terror for Muslims in America. The country was still in the early stages of the current legitimacy crisis, and all manner of political censorship made left movements non-existent. The culture was impossibly reactionary. Any clear-eyed fascist will look back at that for a model of how to kill DSA’s momentum. That’s what NSPM-7 and the “far-left terror” stuff is really for…

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What is the meaning of empire? Ta-Nehisi Coates commiserates with Hasan Minhaj about living unaware of American imperialism for too long, and I confess why coming to consciousness about empire was key to my personal political awakening.

The UAE is facilitating a genocide in Sudan, and it’s doing so as a sub-imperial power of the United States. Chris Van Hollen is among the members of Congress trying to change that.

Left-populist candidates won 11 out of 18 electoral campaigns this week, ushering in a wave that will transform American politics one way or another.

And in the back half of the episode, I dig up my late 2024 interview with William Lawrence, who just won the Democratic Party’s nomination for Congress in Michigan and now heads to the general. Among the questions we explore:

• What is primacy and how did it become an American strategy?

• What are the contradictions in US industrial policy?

• What alternative economic policies would be available if the US were not committed to primacy?

• What makes Stuart Hall my sensei?

• How does primacy relate to China and great-power competition?

• What kind of international order is emerging?

• What is the political coalition that can keep us out of catastrophe?

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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Over at The Bang-Bang Podcast, my co-host Lyle and I were joined by the actor Ryan Perez, who makes his living in the industry our latest film convo is secretly about.

On his podcast An Actor Despairs—a rueful wink at Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares—Ryan has turned hundreds of conversations with working actors into a running chronicle of Hollywood’s political economy. The first stretch of this episode is that chronicle in miniature: Streaming killed residuals, consolidation killed the middle-class actor, and it’s now cheaper to fly three hundred people to Budapest than to shoot a movie set in Los Angeles, a city Ryan calls Detroit with warmer weather. What happens to the actor class, he warns, happens to all of us.

Alex Garland’s Ex Machina plays differently after that conversation. Caleb’s helicopter ride announces the plutocracy before anyone says AI (“We’ve been flying over his estate for two hours”). Nathan, the bro-god CEO Oscar Isaac plays somewhere between Sam Altman and Alex Karp, has scraped the world’s cellphones and search engines to build Ava, then built his Turing test around Caleb’s porn profile. Anticipatory barely covers it. Even the compound’s power cuts, we eventually learn, are the cost of thinking machines, a 2014 preview of the data-center strain now dimming actual grids.

The conversation’s sharpest turn reads the film as empire. Nathan is the colonizer who manufactures his own colonized, the civilizing mission as domination in a lab coat. The master-slave dialectic runs the plot. Dominating a mere machine satisfies nobody, so Nathan needs Ava human enough for her submission to mean something, and once she’s human enough, rebellion follows. The real Turing test, everyone agrees, is her manipulative, cynical escape. Whether to keep rooting for her through those wordless final minutes, after she leaves the one character with a moral compass locked in to die, is the question the episode leaves standing.

Bang-Bang

Ex Machina (2014) w/ Ryan Perez | Ep. 73

Ryan Perez makes his living in the industry this film is secretly about. An actor (The Gilded Age, et al.) and host of An Actor Despairs—a rueful wink at Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares—Ryan has turned hundreds of conversations with working actors into a running chronicle of Hollywood’s political economy. The first stretch of this episode is that chronicle in miniature. Streaming killed residuals, consolidation killed the middle-class actor, and it’s now cheaper to fly three hundred people to Budapest than to shoot a movie set in Los Angeles, a city Ryan calls Detroit with warmer weather. What happens to the actor class, he warns, happens to all of us…

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a month ago · Van and Lyle are Bang-Bang

Further Reading and Listening

An Actor Despairs, Ryan’s podcast

Ryan’s website

“The Life and Death of Hollywood” by Daniel Bessner

“Lordship and Bondage” from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

“‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza” by Yuval Abraham

“Militarism as a Province of Accumulation” from Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Teaser from the Episode

Ex Machina Trailer

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We’re living through an era in which three things are happening at once: Imperialist geopolitical practices are proliferating, the working class is becoming a lumpenproletariat,1 and the nation-state is losing legitimacy and coherence.

I think these trends are causally linked, leading to a provisional hypothesis: Expanding the share of the population comprised of surplus labor simultaneously engorges empire and destroys the nation-state.

A while back, I wrote that the industrial form of capitalism needed us. Its primary means of generating profits required mass employment in production processes. Growing populations were associated with more growth and more productive potential. But as we moved from industrial capitalism to whatever the hell is going on now, the masses have become increasingly lumpen:

The oligarchic form of capitalism that dominates today (financialized, rentier-based, asset-inflating at the top, debt-fueled at the bottom) doesn’t need a mass workforce. What looks like the “middle class” hollowing out, shrinking, is the working majority becoming surplus labor. Especially white-collar workers.

Concentrating wealth in AI and military output exacerbates this problem of making a not-working class. Military spending kills job creation; it’s economic waste, an alternative to investment. AI, meanwhile, is a form of automation that de-industrializes white-collar workers. What factory labor has experienced since the 1970s, spreadsheet labor experiences in the age of AI.

This is a grim assessment that helps make sense of the rise of political repression in rich countries. Restive populations must be systematically surveilled, corralled, and disciplined.

As grim as that is, I didn’t take this assessment to its logical conclusion: If the 1% can consolidate wealth and power despite growing unemployment and economic insecurity for everyone else, then the project of encasing both capital and labor within a single entity called “the nation” loses meaning. Oligarchs might continue to justify their actions in terms of “the nation,” but the form of political order that they impose will increasingly resemble empire—a system of exclusion, tiered rights, and pacification for the sake of exploitation, extraction, and dispossession.

In the eyes of industrialists, financiers, and Big Tech, the social contract—to the extent we can say it actually existed—was always a sop. And that conditional luxury (to them) is incompatible with a world of scarcity where they aim to remain in power.

What all of this means is that civil rights and worker protections—things we took for granted my entire life in association with democracy—will be taken away as democracy itself ebbs, oligarchy asserts itself, and the imperialist form of political ordering starts to supplant the nation-state.

I have to stress that all of the above is very provisional. There is undoubtedly a link between nationalism and empire; there always has been. But there hasn’t been enough thinking about how to specify what that relationship is. At the start of Trump 2.0, Mike Brenes and I wrote a piece dubbing ours a “New Age of Nationalism.” I actually wanted it to be a piece heralding the return of empire but that wouldn’t fly with the publisher (Foreign Affairs), at the time.

But in a way, the past few years have been both an age of nationalism and an age of empire. Claims to the nation have been the basis for amassing and exploiting state power in brutal and corrupt ways. Nationalism is the only ideology through which a worker in the national security state can claim to be doing something good in pursuing global primacy or smiting China. And yet, nothing the national security state is up to can claim to be benefiting all (or even most) people who belong to the nation.

So why am I not wallowing in despair?

Because democratic socialism is rising to meet the tide of fascism. Because my friend Will Lawrence (a member of DSA) just won his congressional primary election today in Michigan against two candidates who were leading national-security ghouls (one of which was endorsed by Tony Blinken). And because anti-imperialism seems to be popular again.

As I learned from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, there is no fate but what we make. A bleak prognosis can be a wake-up call.

I’ve hoped that the means of liberation are immanent to the conditions of domination. Suddenly there are signs this is actually true.

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What is the meaning of left populism and what does it stand for? Inside the politics of the most popular candidates running in 2026, from William Lawrence to Francesca Hong.

What happened at the Pentagon’s secret meeting with munitions suppliers, and what does it have to do with the novelty of a “forever” missile gap?

What nations does the United States still control as colonies in 2026, and how can they get free? Diving into my recent essay, “What’s Sovereignty to An Imperialist?”

An update on Marco Rubio’s attempt to transform the US State Department into a far-right deep state.

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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The past few days have made visible something that typically goes unseen: American colonialism. And I don’t mean historical wrongs; I mean active wrongs, US colonial relations that endure in 2026.

Darializa Avila Chevalier (DAC), the DSA candidate who will soon be headed to Congress as New York’s newest representative, posted a short video on Instagram trying to raise awareness about America’s 128-year history of colonizing and pillaging Puerto Rico. And boy did she succeed.

The clip went viral on every social media platform, kicking off not-especially-productive debates within the online left. But its virality exerted a gravitational pull on every other part of the political spectrum too, eliciting reactions from liberals and reactionaries who (based on how they got rage-baited by the entire thing) had little-to-no prior knowledge that the US even had colonies in 2026.

Within left circles, at issue was DAC’s call for Puerto Rican independence and self-determination. Any unfree territory has three post-colonial choices: independence, statehood, or a semi-sovereign relation of formal dependence called “free association.” Self-determination is the process of realizing one of those choices. A process that the US has denied Puerto Ricans up to now.

Statehood is a Fake Option

If you reduce DAC’s position to a soundbite, it sounds like she’s foreclosing on self-determination for Puerto Rico by prescribing independence for Puerto Rico—especially because a majority of Puerto Ricans voted in 2024 in favor of statehood, not independence.1 But that’s the thing about a soundbite—stripping anything of its context changes its meaning.

DAC moves in some of the same circles I do, where the coloniality of modern empire is a familiar subject, as are the pathways out of it. Statehood should be a choice. But in the context of all we know and discuss, we spend little time on statehood for the obvious reason that US politics refuses the possibility and always has. During the 2024 election, one of Trump’s popular MAGA lines of attack against Florida governor Ron DeSantis was that he supported Puerto Rican statehood. Senator Mitch McConnell called the idea of Puerto Rican statehood “full-bore socialism.” The House has passed multiple bills granting Puerto Rico self-determination (why those bills exclude America’s other colonies is another matter) but they go nowhere because the Senate will not vote on them.

In this context, pushing for statehood is like pushing for Lucy to hold the football for Charlie Brown. “If you be a good little territory and don’t cause trouble, one day you might get to be like Hawai’i”—exploited and dispossessed in a thousand different ways, but you can at least get the rights and obligations of a state in the US federal system.

If only.

Compounding the statehood-as-fantasy problem is the reality of America in 2026—a declining hegemon actively seeking to impose imperialist relations on more, not fewer, countries. The United States itself is fractured, descending into tyranny, and actively Peripheralizing in places like Texas, thanks to the forces of both militarism and global financial capital. Not a lot of liberation on that horizon.

But my point is not about arguing the merits of statehood versus independence; it’s that statehood is not an available option because America remains an empire (a point I unpack below). And as long as people pretend like statehood is an option while neither the senate nor the president will allow it, the depraved circumstance of colonial limbo will prevail.

But there are two larger issues that the Puerto Rico question brings to the fore: America’s other imperialist relations, outside Puerto Rico, and what MAGA policymakers think about sovereignty and “the nation.”

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Where is the Non-Sovereign Pacific?

The US denies self-determination to not only Puerto Rico, but also Guam, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The US holds the partial sovereignty of Palau, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia, forming the largest share of what I call the Non-Sovereign Pacific. The US has additionally imposed ongoing informal imperial relations on several other countries (Iraq, Venezuela, Ecuador, Afghanistan, and a half-dozen more)…but to prevent this from getting unwieldy I want to zero in on Guam—the most predatorily valuable of America’s colonies from the perspective of the military strategist’s imagination.

Both Puerto Rico and Guam became US colonies as the result of the Spanish-American War. Both have longstanding and large independence movements. Both have lobbied the US government over the decades for the right to self-determination. Both host a US military presence, Guam much more so than Puerto Rico.

Given the historical and structural similarities, any demand made against the US government on Puerto Rico’s behalf must logically apply to Guam too. And yet, in both the lefty and the centristy hot takes about DAC’s demand for Puerto Rican independence, I saw nothing from anyone about Guam. AOC’s prior attempts to seek self-determination for Puerto Rico also excluded any mention of Guam.

There’s no excuse for Guam’s absence—How to Hide An Empire was a bestseller. I’ve written about Guam’s plight in a popular magazine. An amicus brief was recently filed with the US Supreme Court that exposes the harm that befalls Guam as a result of its non-sovereignty. The Guam blind spot persists all the same because the US security state finds exploitable value in having Guam function as both a shield against and a platform for power projection. It has a vested interest in refusing Guam’s consent to functioning as a sacrifice zone in military strategy.

Guam’s great elder statesman, Dr. Robert Underwood, explained recently that statehood for Guam is a pipe dream. Current political reality sees the MAGA US House of Representatives voting to strip people born in Guam of US citizenship. How can anyone expect (or want) statehood in that context?

It’s not in the interest of the colonies to get free (or assimilate) at the expense of the others. That’s classic divide-and-rule shit.

Holding self-determining demands together is logical but also strategic—Puerto Rico shares everything in common with the Non-Sovereign Pacific. Acting and making demands accordingly shouldn’t be that hard considering the empire isn’t really serious about permitting self-determination anyway.

MAGA’s Nazi-like Definition of Sovereignty

And that actually raises the other problem here—the MAGA conception of sovereignty and “the nation.”

The United States under Trump 2.0 is shrinking the circle of who gets to be included in their view of the nation. The empire is expanding abroad and consuming itself at home. The way the far right thinks about geopolitics would seem to make the constitutional question of self-determination moot. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said recently:

The nation that depends on its adversaries for critical inputs is not truly sovereign…We have rediscovered at great cost what Hamilton taught us around the time of our founding: that every nation ‘ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply.’ That our strength, in other words, is derived from what we can build, for the nation that cannot produce what it needs is not truly secure…semiconductors, AI, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, shipbuilding, critical minerals, and pharmaceuticals…More than sectors of the economy, these are the sources of national power. And America must lead in each of them.

Bessent is articulating a conception of sovereignty that not only insists on American global primacy under conditions where that is simply impossible. It also insists on controlling, to the exclusion of others, the resources and economic sectors that US elites believe are necessary to be functionally sovereign. A redefinition of sovereignty is happening here where empires alone have it, and that should recast how we see the entire question of A) American democracy but also B) struggles for self-determination and the unrealism of wanting or demanding statehood from people whose brains are Lebensraum-addled.

So back to where we began.

DAC wants self-determination for Puerto Rico. Everyone on my side of the line does. But statehood is not and will never be an option until something fundamental about US politics changes, and that is not in the offing. Independence is probably the most realistic alternative to being a colony but the only liberatory alternative to the status quo is an anti-imperialist existence, regardless of whether you encase it in the language of “independence,” “statehood,” or “free association.” And that means confronting the decaying empire or routing around it, not allowing it to be your pimp.

I have no doubt that Puerto Ricans would prefer to have full autonomy plus substantial reparations and continuing US federal support, regardless how you package it. At some level, haggling over the constitutional or legal form obscures the basic question of justice and decency. And you know what they say about No Justice…

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Think tanks and the foreign policy establishment are in crisis and dangerously out of touch with reality—Emma Ashford reports on the Aspen Security Forum.

How the ruling class reproduces itself by co-opting young policy-school graduates into believing they’re not actually workers.

The Trump administration is trying to manufacture a new anti-communist red scare, enlisting the national security state into a counter-revolutionary political project.

Marco Rubio is obsessed with making Cuba an enemy.

How Democrats gave up the only leverage they had to stop the Iran War.

And the dismal state of the nuclear disarmament movement in 2026—why preventing nuclear war and nuclear proliferation requires reconnecting nuclear issues to conventional militarism.

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!