The State Department is now vetting career employees for political loyalty to the president...in the past and now (That’s illegal, so add it to the pile).

The Pentagon is deploying corporate spies in China to steal tech secrets…and they let it be announced in the Washington Post?

Saudi Arabia is rendering Yemen into its Gaza—a site of exceptional war crimes.

Why Netanyahu could go to jail, but for corruption in a submarine deal, not war crimes.

Matt Duss is back with me to explain it all.

Watching recommendations:

• Netflix’s Below;

• East of Eden (sort of);

• Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey;

• Rick & Morty;

• NAZA.

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

You might have heard that subscriptions to newsletters have fallen off a cliff. It’s true, and it’s making me rethink the economics of this entire project. I really don’t want to bring back the paywall, and I also don’t want to abandon the project altogether. So if you value Un-Diplomatic and have the means to keep it going, please consider the less than $2 per week that it takes. And if you can’t, please consider sharing the post with others.

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When I was still a teen, I’d read somewhere that the CIA’s ideal recruit was a “PhD who could win a bar fight.” I think Bill Donovan had said it.

I then spent the next 20 years trying to be that ideal recruit.

• I read all the CIA history books (there weren’t many), and all the John le Carré novels.

• I joined the Air Force and worked in intelligence.

• I built my six-foot frame from a scrawny 142 lbs upon entering basic training to 190 lbs by the time I was legal drinking age.

• I learned a foreign language and traveled to as many countries as my circumstances allowed in order to be “worldly.”

• I got into fights outside bars and clubs before eventually learning how to fight for real.

• I got a PhD and eventually became a defense intellectual.

Jack Ryan was the archetype I wanted to become and I took it very seriously.

But by the time I’d transformed into the CIA ideal, I’d changed. The world had changed. And my view of both the CIA and the national security state had changed too.

Imagine making yourself into the thing you obsess about, the thing you put on a pedestal, only to realize that it was the wrong thing to want. That it wasn’t the noble profession you’d fetishized. That it was instead an overmilitarized, morally compromised life of binge drinking and petty bureaucratic knife fights.

There should be a German word for that.

Seeing power from the standpoint of its victims changes everything. Despite the ability to peer through the mystifications of nationhood and American exceptionalism, some part of me refuses to apologize for having served my country. That service was in support of a regime of global militarism whose body count would make satan himself blush. That brought Trump to power! And yet.

The naïveté of an American imperialist.

To make a religion of state power, and to genuinely believe that you’re righteous because you worship an abstract ideal that demands blood sacrifices without consent from millions, billions even. The only thing I can compare my inner life to since coming to class consciousness is going on a grainy ‘90s talk show after escaping Scientology or the Jim Jones cult. “Set The Cup Down! How I Survived Drinking the Kool-Aid.” It’s not that I don’t feel melancholy or embarrassment; it’s that it’s not enough to keep me quiet when there’s an urgent need to warn others.

So of course, Trump’s CIA has cut a new promotional recruitment ad. Of course it’s explicitly looking for “A PhD who could win a bar fight.” And of course pangs of embarrassment hit me—less for the fool I had been than a vicarious embarrassment. I know how many young men without real prospects in life are ready to be the fools of the next generation.

You might have heard that subscriptions to newsletters have fallen off a cliff. It’s true, and it’s making me rethink the economics of this entire project. I really don’t want to bring back the paywall, and I also don’t want to abandon the project altogether. So if you value Un-Diplomatic and have the means to keep it going, please consider the less than $2 per week that it takes. And if you can’t, please consider sharing the post with others.

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“When I understand my enemy well enough to defeat him, then in that moment, I also love him.” So begins the 2013 film adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s classic sci-fi novel Ender’s Game.

This movie had a large budget ($110 million) and a stacked cast, including Harrison Ford, Viola Davis, and Hailee Steinfeld. Yet, it was a flop at the box office and got an unremarkable reception from critics.

Still, Ender’s Game was a highly personal film in ways that I explain in the latest episode of the Bang-Bang Podcast. As I immersed myself in the formal study of strategy during my Pentagon days, this film and book (which appears on the Marine Corps Commandant’s reading list) helped convince me that peace—not military conflict—is the higher terrain of strategy.

Our guest in this episode, fellow vet Alexander McCoy, debates with us about the politics of Ender’s Game and the inherent (im)morality that comes with organized violence no matter who does it.

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Further Reading

“A Primer on Orson Scott Card and the Ender’s Game Controversy,” by Anna Silman

The Internationalists, by Alexander Ward

“The Great Humbling,” by David Klion

“Four Futures,” By Peter Frase

Strategy and Conscience, by Anatol Rapaport

Ender’s Game Trailer

Teaser From The Episode

Bang-Bang

From the Vault: Ender’s Game (2013) w/ Alexander McCoy

From the vault! Re-releasing one of our earliest and most popular episodes, with antiwar veteran and organizer Alexander McCoy. New episode coming next week. ✌️…

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3 days ago · Van and Lyle are Bang-Bang

You might have heard that subscriptions to newsletters have fallen off a cliff. It’s true, and it’s making me rethink the economics of this entire project. I really don’t want to bring back the paywall, and I also don’t want to abandon the project altogether. So if you value Un-Diplomatic and have the means to keep it going, please consider the less than $2 per week that it takes. And if you can’t, please consider sharing the post with others.

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Revisiting my predictions about the start of the Iran war; why the war happened; who benefits from the war; and what comes next.

Also this episode:

• Understanding why the student-led riots in France will grow then fail.

• What Antonio Gramsci tells us about riots.

• What Joshua Clover tells us about how a riot differs from a strike.

Watching recommendations:

• The Drop on Hulu.

• Netflix’s Below.

• V For Vendetta.

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

You might have heard that subscriptions to newsletters have fallen off a cliff. It’s true, and it’s making me rethink the economics of this entire project. I really don’t want to bring back the paywall, and I also don’t want to abandon the project altogether. So if you value Un-Diplomatic and have the means to keep it going, please consider the less than $2 per week that it takes. And if you can’t, please consider sharing the post with others.

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My first political memory was as a kid watching the LA riots on the news.

I wouldn’t say I enjoyed seeing the burning chaos, but its vivid stakes awakened rather than horrified me. What could have unleashed property destruction, looting, and the occasional casualty in a city I’d spent part of my childhood in? Why did people suddenly seize control of their neighborhoods, and why did it have to take the form of ransacking them? And the most jarring question of all: How could people make the police scared to do their job?

I would find most of my answers a couple years later, when I discovered hip-hop. The kind of root-cause thinking that I champion in my work today really started with these riots and the accounts I heard of them laid over a righteous boom-bap. Ice Cube’s “We Had to Tear This Mothafucka Up.” Tupac’s “To Live and Die in L.A.” Damn near every song on Dr. Dre’s The Chronic.

The acquittal of the police who beat Rodney King on camera was the spark that spread into a fire. But as Mike Davis wrote in The Nation at the time, the riot “was as much about empty bellies and broken hearts as it was about police batons and Rodney King.” Certain conditions have to be in place for a spark to cause a wildfire. A single moment of brutality against one man has to represent a larger travesty embodied in the population. As a member of the Bloods from Inglewood told it:

Rodney King? Shit, my homies be beat like dogs by the police every day. This riot is about all the homeboys murdered by the police, about the little sister killed by the Koreans, about twenty-seven years of oppression. Rodney King just the trigger.

But race is the modality through which class is lived, as Stuart Hall tells us. Causes come in layers.

If you go one layer deeper than the racialized violence that people rebel against, the riot, according to Joshua Clover, is always a surplus population responding to its abjectness, demanding “to set the price of market goods [featuring] participants with no necessary kinship but their dispossession.” Looting, Clover notes, sets the price for goods at zero. That makes the riot an outlaw companion to the more respectable strike, which is workers (not surplus populations) demanding to set the price of labor power. Riot is a problem of circulation; strikes are a problem of production.

Cut to an incipient student-led revolution in France, playing out right now, as you read this.

The BBC and New Yorker will tell you that the students want better conditions for their education, more teachers. That’s not wrong, but it amounts to a surface level take that justifies a pathetic policy response—France should hire a few hundred more teachers as a sop to the riotous students.

But the shortfall of teachers in the classrooms of poorer schools is simply the Rodney Kindling. The leaders of the French riots admit to deeper causes:

The “gangs” [bandes] of students from working-class neighborhoods constitute the actual driving force both within and against the current youth movement. In a sense, this force is less a part of the student movement than it is a continuation of the Nahel1 revolt. It has neither demands nor representatives; it does not conform to the codes of the Left and rejects bourgeois politeness. It wants revenge…the left aligns itself with the other political forces in their efforts to restore peace.…Unlike the left, we have neither flags to wave, nor a tempo to set, nor lessons to teach.

Riots are not a left-right thing.

You might have heard that subscriptions to newsletters have fallen off a cliff. It’s true, and it’s making me rethink the economics of this entire project. I really don’t want to bring back the paywall, and I also don’t want to abandon the project altogether. So if you value Un-Diplomatic and have the means to keep it going, please consider the less than $2 per week that it takes. And if you can’t, please consider sharing the post with others.

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This riot, like the LA riots, is a riot of refusal—a refusal of the abject conditions of the have-nots, the policed, the socially marginal. And so the riot’s vanguard may be its racialized surplus population—inevitably the most oppressed in society—but the ranks of the precariat swell by the day. Growing numbers of people face grim prospects for health, employment, affordability, and community security.

That energy engorges the riot, gives it sympathy and strength. And if no policy can remedy what makes the riot potent in the first place, then no policy will pacify.

The riot is an early stage of revolution. The riot puts the powerful on the back foot. The riot forces the comfortable in a crouched corner where they must choose between reflecting on how liberalism led to this or quietly hoping the state will repress the masses by any means necessary so that this nastiness goes away. France’s riot is in full swing.

How far will the student revolution go? Probably not much farther. Why not? Because it amounts to a war of maneuver.

Antonio Gramsci used military metaphors to describe strategies of political struggle. He distinguished wars of maneuver from wars of position. Scholars have fruitlessly debated the meaning and applicability of these two forms of war making in Gramscian thought.

The key distinction is that wars of position strategize toward favorable structures; they generate advantages at the moment of clashing forces. An arms buildup is a war of position that relates to the battlefield campaign as a war of maneuver. Protests, riots, and forms of direct action are wars of maneuver too. Frantz Fanon articulated a similar idea in separating what he called “the event” from “the situation.”

Anyone who’s spent even the slightest amount of time in left spaces has heard the cliche about what is to be done in answer of every problem: Organize! It’s funny because it’s true. But it’s true because organizing—in its thousand meanings—always aims at generating structural or positional advantages, so that when the time comes for a campaign, the deck is stacked favorably. Organizing is a way of waging a war of position. The war of maneuver succeeds because successful wars of position preceded them.

And that’s why the French riots are unlikely to go much farther. It’s the same reason anti-ICE protests have reached their limit; the same reason the #NoKings protests did not metasticize into a more militant movement.

Oligarchs are either winning or have already won the war of position in so many ways. Letting them kill union density took away civil society’s greatest leverage. The repressive capacity of modern national security states serves those with power and in oligarchies, that’s owners of capital.

Without effective wars of position preceding wars of maneuver, mass movements of refusal signal so much revolutionary energy but do so from a position of deep, deep structural disadvantage. And so what will eventually meet the student or the anti-ICE protestor or the anti-monarchist or the peace activist is the baton and the rubber bullet and the police raid.

The importance of understanding the riot as a politics of refusal, though, is to know that the repressive power of the state will neither cow nor deter the next riot. Or the next. You don’t have to win liberation for humanity. You have to refuse defeat.

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Washington policy reports rarely garner attention, but last month one blew up because it made heterodox recommendations about the US military position in Asia.

The author, Jennifer Kavanagh, is seen as a “right-restrainer,” and the report was published at Defense Priorities, a libertarian-leaning military think tank that has been intellectually aligned with JD Vance.1 Her recommendations amount to substantial military withdrawal from East Asia and consolidation in the Pacific Islands. That’s wholly incompatible with the liberal conception of primacy that the national security state and its technocrats have made common (Beltway) sense for two generations.2 Given the political auspices of the report, that might be the point.

I dedicated an episode of the pod to parsing each of the report’s recommendations by applying a three-part test:

1. Does it make any attempt to deal with the root causes of regional insecurity?

2. Does it treat military threats as symptoms of deeper causes of insecurity?

3. Does it adhere to a principle of least-harm?

You can check out the episode and its transcript for the full breakdown, but the thumbnail sketch is:

1. Do the recommendations make any attempt to deal with the root causes of regional insecurity? (NO)

2. Do the recommendations treat military threats as symptoms of deeper causes of insecurity? (for some recommendations YES, for some NO)

3. Do the recommendations adhere to a principle of least-harm? (NO, they redirect harm and risk generating further harm)

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To be clear, I think this report is an improvement on the status quo in some ways; I even endorse some of its recommendations. But it’s not exactly a document that progressives or socialists should make their own. I would not put it in front of AOC, for example, and if for some reason she wanted to see it, I would have to include annotated commentary identifying where we dissent, what’s missing, and why the framing favors the national security state rather than the people.

Dead-End Imperialism

That leads me to my most profound reservation about the report: Its analysis is framed in terms of “island chains” stretching across the Pacific Ocean—a conceptual language that forecloses on any ability to generate meaningful Asian, US, or Pacific security. These “chains” are elite, militarist social facts of relatively recent vintage. Working within them as if they are eternal reference points for military control constitutes an antagonistic security trap that, as a byproduct, justifies the permanent subjugation of the Non-Sovereign Pacific.

The first, second, and third island chains exist as reference points in the imaginations of a small, transnational group of naval imperialists. As naval imperialists and war profiteers did with the American “preparedness” project paving the way to World War One, today’s imperialists have spent two decades spreading their gospel, especially on Capitol Hill and in ally governments. They are committed to securing geopolitical advantage by constructing invisible “walls at sea,” building up military power for the sake of enclosing the global commons and “winning” hypothetical future wars pregnant with apocalyptic potential (because they involve nuclear-armed states).

I was once a military strategist. I once treated the island chains as real lines worth preparing to fight for because the US navy uses them as artificial boundaries that it tries to secure in the event of war. If you secure the first island chain, the thinking went, you secure “defense in-depth,”3 which helps you win war and prevent the forced closure of sea lanes around China.

But defense in-depth does not have the military value it historically did because modern warfare is saturated with precision-guided weapons—drones, rockets, hypersonic missiles—that can cover vast distances in minutes. Accelerating the speed of war erases the advantages of controlling space. And any scenario where China decides to physically block American access to sea lanes is a fevered one where the US would’ve had to make a sequence of self-defeating choices to even be plausible.

More importantly, there is no prospect of making anyone more secure by taking a military warfighting concept and elevating it to being a vortex for scarce national resources. Should a dotted line that half-witting planners of Armageddon use in their vocation be allowed to swallow statecraft?

No reasonable person would answer yes. Yet, plenty of people in Washington do.

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Confusing Militarism With Statecraft

I said something along these lines while scrolling through the sewage dump of social media. The best disagreeable response to my post was:

In Admiral Liu Huaqing's 1980's "Offshore Defense" (近海防御) doctrine, the island chains serve as geographical milestones for the PLA Navy's development—focusing initially on the First Island Chain before expanding capabilities out to the Second Island Chain and beyond.

I’d been told this factoid in my Pentagon days and it was funny to see it wielded now in defense of island-chain military reasoning. The question that it obscures is whether US statecraft should be drawn into the practice of military boundary-drawing in international waters to justify an eye-watering military buildup that leaves its rival needing to reciprocate, thereby leaving both sides less secure—a classic security dilemma.

The navalists will tell you, as I once would have, that if China is scheming to project power within or assert maritime control of a space whose perimeter is defined by the invisible lines, the US must do the same.

But 1) the US doesn’t have to choose negative reciprocity even if China does (what is actually worth killing for?) and 2) we cannot conflate PLA military planning with Chinese statecraft.

In 1954, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Advance Study Group proposed to Eisenhower that the US consider “deliberately precipitating war with the USSR in the near future”—a moment when the Soviets already had nuclear weapons but not enough to establish mutually assured destruction. Members of the Joint Chiefs wanted preventive nuclear war. Maniacal.

Mercifully, the US did not follow the Chiefs’ advice. Does the fact that senior American military leadership advised something world-ending mean that governments should’ve treated the US like it was actually going to end the world? Great powers are going to have military strategists, and military strategists are going to fantasize about mass death in ways that require geographical benchmarks. That is all the island chains are—geographical benchmarks for imperialist designs.

Making a Pacific Powder Keg

But the most blinkered part of island-chain reasoning is the way that it redirects insecurity without concern for why insecurity existed to begin with; it distracts from the purpose of state power.

If the point of statecraft is not domination but reducing insecurity for Asia and the Pacific (and by extension for the US), then relocating US forces from the first-island chain to the second is a loser without some drastic accompanying changes (which I talk about in the podcast). If US military power falls back to a more technically defensible position in the second- or third-island chain (Oceania), that would simply shift the line of inter-imperial competition, substituting a new Pacific-Island powder keg (that still ensnares Japan) for an East Asian powder keg (that used to center on Japan).

Chinese officials have read Kavanagh’s report, and have a similar concern, which they package in the language of seeking “constructive strategic stability”: A stability grounded in great-power relations with a positive valence.4 Combining retrenchment with a detente-like relationship of collaboration is the only way to avoid a future that ends in great-power war.

The goal of statecraft should be to end great-power rivalry, not relocate it. As long as the capitalist world-system has declining growth prospects, the US refuses to relinquish its formal sphere of influence in the Pacific Islands, and US oligarchy requires a permanent war economy that plans for war with China, the main site of inter-imperial conflict simply moves but does not disappear.

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 Trump administration’s geopolitical concept of “Greater North America” is the fascist imagineering of international relations. It’s imperialist, but a variation that differs meaningfully from liberal empire…and the implications are dire. I break down my new essay in Foreign Policy magazine, “Trump’s Greater North America is Fascist Geopolitics.”

Also this episode:

• Why the costs of the Iran War reveals it as a war for oligarchy.

• On Trump’s willingness to sacrifice LA and San Diego to keep fighting Iran.

• Senator Chris Murphy was barred from a US military base in the UAE in order for the Trump administration to avoid democratic accountability for the Iran War.

Watching/listening recommendations:

• The Drop on Hulu.

• The Mother Country Radicals podcast series.

• The song “Ain’t Nobody” by Chaka Khan and Rufus.

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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When I worked as a Pentagon strategist, I was taught that our job was to design a force that could prolong global primacy. When I asked what that meant, I was told global military superiority. When I asked what that meant, I was told the answer had been the “two-war construct”—that is, the ability to fight and win two conventional wars against mid-sized adversaries (Iran and North Korea) in different regions (the Middle East and Asia) in overlapping time frames.

But because the “pivot to Asia” had been announced only a month or so earlier, my job was to help figure out how to ensure the US could also defeat a technologically advanced great power (China) too. That meant something more…lethal…than the two-war construct.

I had been a true believer in the cult of American primacy, but even for me, translating what primacy meant in practice seemed a bit rich. Why in the hell did we ever need to plan to fight two mid-tier wars simultaneously? It made no sense. And now we were adding China to the mix?

I shared my skepticism to the guy showing me the ropes (a friend who would become a senior official in the Biden administration a decade later). But he brought me around with one word: Options.

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He told me we were trying to give a future president maximum optionality, up to and including the option to launch multiple wars simultaneously, or even nuclear Armageddon. Through the procurement, research, and budgeting decisions we made in the present, we were, quite self-consciously—making possible the use of overwhelming lethal power in the future.

I didn’t think too hard about it; there was work to be done. But if you bought into the premise that 1) even bad US presidents were rational actors, and 2) American primacy underwrote a US-centered hegemonic order whose alternative was surely chaos, then the “give the president options” principle made sense. I mean, shouldn’t I want the president to have more options for statecraft rather than fewer?

So I got on with the pivot to Asia.

But after about a year had passed, I came across a long essay by the OG nuclear strategist, Bernard Brodie (I was finishing my PhD at night). Written in 1978, Brodie’s prose was in the impenetrably boring, I-dare-you-to-keep-reading style common in international security studies. It’s a tough, even confusing read for anyone who’s not a nuclear scholar.

But he also wrote it at a time when scholars just didn’t allow political variables into claims about strategic theory. Neither did Brodie. But amid his numerous, sometimes meandering points, he took issue with the arguments of defense intellectuals associated with the far-right Committee on the Present Danger—nuclear hawks who blended warmongering, conspiracy theory-level anti-communism, and advocacy for military buildups.

Those lunatics relied on a logic of ever-expanding attack options as the prerequisite for deterrence against an ever-shape-shifting Soviet menace—if the US couldn’t attack the Soviets in a bevy of ways with a constantly growing arsenal of weapons, then the Soviets would somehow hold freedom hostage and/or launch a preventive nuclear war.

Brodie thought this was nonsense, and his intervention made me rethink the merits of “giving the president options.” His most memorable point was that the nuclear lunatics’:

readiness to spend billions of dollars to cover a contingency that most of his peers would regard as extremely dubious is a little breath-taking…the thinking up of ingenious new possibilities is deceptively cheap and easy, and the burden of proof must be on those who urge the payment of huge additional premiums for putting their particular notions into practice.

I grew less comfortable with the optionality logic of military strategy. Eventually, I came to see imperialist military strategy as a total dead end.

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Nuclear wonks in Washington hold up Brodie as a totemic figure while ignoring most of what he had to say. Looking at what’s transpired since Brodie’s 1970s admonition, it’s clear the lunatics won. In Washington, they usually do.

Nobody inside the Beltway under age 50 could tell you anything about the Committee on the Present Danger, and it’s not their fault; the progeny of the Committee run policy schools like SAIS now. People once seen as crackpots like Colin Gray and Paul Wolfowitz came to be seen as serious thinkers. And the post-McGovern Democratic Party had been so obsessed with not appearing “weak” on national security that it normalized most of the nuclear-hawk shit that had once been exceedingly controversial. Defense strategy from the ‘80s onward—a train wreck of epic proportions—has been predicated on giving the president options.

Fast forward to Trump 2.0, whose Department of War now argues with a straight face that “credible nuclear options” would “expand the president’s option space by providing him with realistic and credible options and therefore strengthen deterrence.” Last month, Elbridge Colby, one of Hegseth’s underlings, reiterated the nuclear strategy he’s in charge of will be expanding the types and quantities of US nuclear lethality, including the development of tactical nuclear weapons for limited nuclear war fighting—a move that spits on Brodie’s grave. And Colby’s reasoning, surprise, is “giving the president options”:

Who, in the age of MAGA counter-revolution and Democratic Party support for genocide and illegal war making, thinks that the US president should have push-button nuclear launch authority, to say nothing of giving him the options to “take decisive action against any target, anywhere, at any time?”

We live in an age where rationality does not govern force. At least not in the sense that strategic theorists assert. Instead, force is an instrument for a politics of counter-revolution and oligarchy—a politics powered by conspiracy theory, racial and gender resentments, and outright corruption.

If the Iran War teaches us anything, it should be that bullshit wars are proliferating; and if they are possible, they are also inevitable. The only way to guard against bullshit wars, and to maybe tamp down on their prevalence, is to tie the hands of future presidents, not give them the ability to annihilate us 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.

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ICYMI:

Separating truth from fiction in Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s “State of the Force” speech at Quantico:

A crisis of capitalism driving a crisis of American militarism.

Autonomous Warfare Command is a time bomb for the enshittification of the US military.

Hegseth is accusing journalists of treason and lying about the Iran War while bragging about slashing staff while inflating the military budget.

Why are three of the biggest losers on the MAGA right (Elon Musk, Palmer Lucky, and Newt Gingrich) appointed to be the Pentagon’s brain trust in charge of the “future of war?”

And how does Hegseth narrate the role of the military in peripheralizing the imperial core, making Alabama more like the new Guam or Philippines?

My co-host Julia Gledhill is back with me to break it all down, including her new investigation for The Baffler magazine on the role of autonomous manufacturing in transferring wealth from taxpayers to venture capitalists via the national security 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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Earlier this year, Pete Hegseth gave a speech at one of the new, imperialist multilateralism conferences the US now leads against the old liberal order. The delegates in attendance hailed almost entirely from hard-right governments in Central America and the Caribbean.

The thing I noticed first when I’d heard about Hegseth’s appearance was the curious absence of Mexico and Brazil, left-leaning governments that fall within the rough geography of everyone else present.

Then I read the speech, which rolled out a new strategic concept: “Greater North America.” I was struck at how undeniably fascist it was. All the hallmarks were right there in the text.

I’ve been vocal about diagnosing US foreign policy as imperialist, and that got me thinking—Is fascist geopolitics somehow unique? How, if at all, does liberal imperialism differ from fascist imperialism?

So I got researching and writing.

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The fruits of that effort come in the form of a new essay for Foreign Policy, where I explain why this geopolitical idea of “Greater North America” is fascist worldmaking. Linking counter-revolution at home to a distinct version of empire (near-)abroad is the only way to make sense of the MAGA bid for both Canada and Greenland in a way that accounts for both the far-right political formation that MAGA represents and the Monroe Doctrine that MAGA has revivified. And the implications are horrific—this new supposed deal between Denmark and the US sets up Greenland to be the new Sudetenland (for those who know their Nazi history).

Something that should not just raise alarm bells but arouse introspection is that the methods of fascist geopolitics are imperialist top to bottom—methods that the US has been intermittently deploying around the world for generations, and with growing frequency the past decade or so. I do not see my argument as an entry in the “Is It Fascism?” debate for precisely that reason.1

We’re in the midst of something different and distinctly dark. It’s neither the sudden emergence of empire nor a departure from empire; it’s a variety of empire. A fascistic variety. And that’s why the region MAGA now dubs “Greater North America” is host to the greatest concentration of American tactics of domination than anywhere else in the world.

Here’s an amuse-bouche from my essay in Foreign Policy:

…In the popular mind, fascism is thought of as a domestic political project. But fascist great powers of the 20th century all championed imperialist campaigns in their regions that were distinct in their violent ambition as compared to their liberal imperialist counterparts. Scholars like Paul Sweezy and Aimé Césaire even saw fascism as a mutation of imperialism. Fascists and imperialists alike engage in military buildups, expand territory through conquest, construct exclusionary spheres of influence with other great powers, and impose settler colonialism and unequal exchange on foreign territories. Fascist foreign policy is imperialist. But it also has a violently counterrevolutionary edge.

MAGA can be understood as an elite counterrevolutionary project that serves the interests of capital by using the state to impose violence on its enemies and redistribute wealth upward. The goal is to overturn the legacy of the New Deal order and the civil rights that came with it. MAGA’s Greater North America is the overseas extension of this project: providing aid to reactionary governments, subverting progressive and socialist ones, and repressing organized labor by any means across the hemisphere.

Every empire lies to itself about what it’s doing, but the engine of fascist empire is a stab-in-the-back myth that treats conspiratorial grievance as its motor fuel. It accounts for real suffering in the present by blaming often-fake political betrayals in the past…

Read the full piece at Foreign Policy. (If you’re a patron and hit a paywall let me know!)

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Making sense of the Trump summit with China’s Xi Jinping—a nonevent, and that’s good! But the sources of rivalry remain. Why MAGA respects Chinese power and why an imperialist peace between the great powers is no peace at all.

Trump’s Greenland deal is bad for literally everybody.

Marco Rubio rejects international order at the United Nations and Western governments are stuck pretending that the world’s leading predator nation is its protector.

Against data centers or A.I.? Then the US security state is coming for you! First they came for the peace protestors…

Russian hybrid aggression has spilled out of Ukraine and into Europe—why the “sandbox theory” of support for Ukraine was always going to be self-defeating.

And YouTuber Alec The Pen satirizes the “Secret Society of Democratic Centrists.”

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

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Training as an international-relations scholar in the ‘00s meant getting pounded with the idea that multilateral institutions are good because they facilitate cooperation and, by logical extension, reduce the prevalence of war. Multilateralism’s web also happened to be part of globalization in an age when scholars, pundits, and politicians alike presented globalization as an inevitable force of nature. To oppose the multilateralism-as-virtue premise was to be a war fetishist who devalued anything that wasn’t military power.

Coming to live in New Zealand a decade or so after receiving that training, I encountered a country whose lanyard class views multilateralism in precisely the way an IR scholar from the early ‘00s would. Their (our) foreign policy elites have always taken for granted that multilateralism is good. Multilateral institutions give New Zealand a means of fulfilling its self-conception as a “small trading nation” by plugging into the matrix of global capitalism, and a “good global citizen” by pooling its efforts with others.

But this way of thinking has not only evaded crucial questions all along;1 it has been outmoded by reality—the reason for my intervention here.

We should be conceptually clear: Multilateralism is form without content. Forms have no inherent valence. In our conjuncture, the cooperation that multilateral exchange facilitates is increasingly directed toward war, exploitation, and domination—the very things multilateralism had been presumed to be a bulwark against.

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We should’ve always been aware of the political work that multilateral cooperation was doing. After all, the godfather of neoliberal IR himself, Robert Keohane, confessed in 2020 that he fucked up:

My work on multilateral institutions, which was done in a period of increasing multilateral cooperation, is challenged by increasing inequality in capitalist democracies, financial crisis, and nationalist forms of populism.

If Keohane can update his priors at least this much, the rest of us have no excuse.

Scholars of MAGA politics during Trump 1.0 often commented that Trump foreign policy opposes multilateral institutions. When Mike Pompeo was Trump’s Secretary of State, he gave a now-forgotten speech in 2018 that not only said as much, but that foreshadowed his small-handed successor’s withdrawal from 66 international institutions earlier this year:

Multilateralism has too often become viewed as an end unto itself. The more treaties we sign, the safer we supposedly are. The more bureaucrats we have, the better the job gets done. Was that ever really true?…exiting or renegotiating outdated or harmful treaties, trade agreements, and other international arrangements that do not serve our sovereign interests, or the interests of our allies…We’re supporting institutions that we believe can be improved; institutions that work in American interests.

At the time of Pompeo’s speech, concluding that Trump was against multilateralism wasn’t wrong. Increasingly, though, it’s just not right.

Trump 2.0 has been extremely active fashioning multilateral arrangements that facilitate imperialist relations 1) between the global North and South but also 2) between the US and everyone else. These efforts lack vision, and are pregnant with contradictions, but they have the US groping toward a reactionary, anti-liberal, some might say fascist, global order. I’m talking about an imperialist multilateralism. It’s happening right in front of us but is being wildly mischaracterized and misunderstood.

The Board of “Peace” is the most grotesque example of imperialist multilateralism, coordinating the dispossession of Palestinian land via ethnic cleansing and ensuring that the worst humans in the world profit from it. In MAGA elites’ own explanation of the Board, moreover, they have ambition for it to displace the United Nations.

Less rapaciously evil but still imperialist is “Pax Silica,” which traffics in euphemisms about resilient supply chains for advanced technologies industries. That rationalization, of course, masks why these technologies matter to the US security state, how they’re being securitized, who benefits from all of it, and at whose expense it all comes. Pax Silica is attempting to concentrate quasi-monopoly control of the highest-profit sector of the global economy in specifically the hands of the US and its rich protectorates, at the expense of China and anyone on friendly terms with it.2 That makes it a circuit in the process of reordering world politics into exclusionary imperialist blocs (which hopefully won’t succeed!).

Crucially, Pax Silica doesn’t work on its own; it’s conjoined with the Minerals Security Partnership (MSP). The two initiatives focus on upstream sources of material power. Governments who are party to the MSP are unwittingly feeding the American war machine while making resource extraction and all the harms that accompany it a growth industry. Both MSP and Pax Silica are imperialist because of the larger project they’re part of—facilitating inter-imperial rivalry—but also because they impose and perpetuate unequal exchange between the US and everyone else.

The MSP, in particular, is nothing more than rich countries of the global North coordinating a regime of extraction from the global South—it’s specifically about securing critical minerals and yet the places the minerals have to come from aren’t “members.” In any other era, everyone would have recognized the stench of imperialist extractivism.

Pax Silica and MSP also accompany other civilization-coded, MAGA-led confabs like “Shield of the Americas,” the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, the Board of “Peace,” and others. These are completely made up arrangements—in Washington, the fashionable term is “minilateralism”—but they’re also the ligatures of fascist worldmaking. Hard-right substitutes for the liberal-coded multilateral institutions that the Trump administration has been warring against ever since it withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords.

And that’s one reason we know the new multilateralism is part of a larger bid to reorder global politics in favor of what you might call imperialist primacy—the Trump administration wants the benefits of presiding over a global hegemonic order but shorn of any obligations or reciprocal restraint that come with maintaining a hegemonic order. Classical theorists had a word for preponderant power minus obligation or restraint: Domination. The Trump administration is attempting to delegitimize and destroy the architecture of liberal ordering in favor of imperial ordering, especially with the global South. All the new MAGA multilateralisms—all of them—are part of that process.

The insult to injury is that much of this vast complex of villainous activity is justified entirely in terms of great-power rivalry with China. And that rivalry, as The Rivalry Peril makes clear, is bad for democracy, bad for the prospect of peace, and bad for any and all struggles for equality.

In an age where “great-power politics” is the norm, multilateralism with empire-states or far-right regimes is necessarily a mask for predatory power politics. The feeling of siege and tumult we experience in the darkness of now risks people reflexively embracing multilateral forms irrespective of content. But that would be relenting to an evil order rather than fighting for the one we need. Don’t be that person.

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A new campaign just launched called Drop The Genocide 20. It demands banning the leading officials from the Biden administration most responsible for Gaza policy since October 7, 2023. Every person with a policy background should sign the pledge to keep these genocidaires away from the halls of power.

The Nation platformed a project at the Center for Working Class Politics tracking four key working-class candidates running as Democrats for the mid-term elections—here’s how they’re doing and what it means for the popularity of economic populism and whether we’re really in a left populist moment.

Public debate has been consumed with the question of whether artificial intelligence will destroy the world. But that debate distracts from the real ways in which AI is ending the world right now—by destroying critical thinking capacities, by deskilling white-collar workers, by inflating the worst financial bubble in economic history...and according to a new MIT research paper, causing “cognitive surrender” in students who are addicted to using AI to avoid the difficulty of learning.

Finally, a new big report in The International Policy Journal makes an airtight case for why New Zealand should become a model for non-offensive defense; avoid acquiring naval frigates; and foreclose on multilateral warfighting with the United States. At stake is whether a small trading nation succumbs to empire or is capable of the independent foreign policy it’s prided itself on for decades.

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

For the Battle of Chile conversation referenced in this episode, as well as part two and three:

Bang-Bang

The Battle of Chile (Part I) (1975) w/ Jonathan M. Katz | Ep. 31

Van and Lyle are joined by journalist and historian Jonathan M. Katz to discuss Patricio Guzmán’s seminal Battle of Chile trilogy—widely regarded as one of the greatest political documentaries ever made—alongside its 1997 epilogue, Obstinate Memory. Our conversation was recorded mostly in the weeks after Trump’s reelection but before his inauguration, a…

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a year ago · 1 like · Van and Lyle are Bang-Bang

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I’m quoted extensively in a new reported piece in The Guardian that’s raising critical questions about how Australian national security elites do their sub-imperialism.

It’s one in a series The Guardian has been running about Australian foreign policy, provoking—or at least promoting—a rethink in Australia, which has allowed the US military and intelligence services to absolutely swamp the place. The title of the piece cuts to the crux of the issue: “As China rises, Australia is increasingly enmeshed in the US war machine. Is the alliance still worth the risk?”

Some of my quotes are, how you say, undiplomatic:

During the presidency of Barack Obama, Dr Van Jackson served as a strategic adviser in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, when Australia took on a new geostrategic significance, part of that administration’s “pivot” to Asia.

“That pivot was about many things in relation to China, but specifically the geographic encirclement of China … in service of war fighting contingencies against China,” Jackson, an associate professor in international relations at the Victoria University of Wellington, told the Guardian.

“At the grand strategy level, it was about ensuring American primacy: global primacy is the principal means and ends of US foreign policy.”

Australia, as an ally, represents to the US an immensely useful piece of geography.

“Australia is this almost-perfect location to be distant enough from the immediate battle space in a Taiwan or an East China Sea scenario, but at the same time, close enough for power projection, for flowing forces, and to function as a kind of rear area base for recovery,” Jackson said.

Jackson noted the US-Australia alliance was often phrased in euphemism, around “mateship”, of shared values and of a commitment to democracy. Australia’s unswerving support for the US was part of that rhetoric too, he said, citing Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of war at the Pentagon, praising Australia for being “with us, even in our less-advisable wars”.

While Jackson believed “that romance” was authentically felt, it was secondary to the US’ interest in using Australia for “very exploitative reasons”.

“Every alliance is exploited … and geography is the purpose Australia serves,” he said.

Given the size of the US military – America’s military budget surpassed that of the next six largest defence budgets on earth combined (including two countries that were actively at war) – the contribution of American allies “in terms of boots on the ground, or the share of aircraft or of frigates, is always a drop in the bucket”, Jackson said.

“When military strategists in the Pentagon think about alliances it’s always about needing access to bases, ports, and airspace,” he said.

“It helps on the margins to have these almost-symbolic military contributions from allies, but it’s not decisive in any way, it doesn’t really ever shift the balance of power, it’s not the difference between victory and defeat: it’s about access.”

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The timing of The Guardian’s expose on Australia is a bit too perfect, coming on the heels of South Koreans newly questioning their alliance with the US, the Trump administration posing an active security threat to Canada and NATO members, and a think-tank report from Washington last week calling for ending America’s mutual defense treaties with its Asian allies.

Everything has changed. Readers of this newsletter have known that for some time.

What’s especially disturbing though is that the national-security ghouls adjacent to my life—whether in Washington or Canberra or Brussels—seem stubbornly ignorant about how the world as it exists destroys their worldview. Facing an epistemic break, they simply take the path of cognitive least resistance, which is to double down on Uncle Sam, lash out with ad hominems at those they disagree with, and quietly insist either that Trump is an aberration (in 2026!?) or that MAGA’s doing three-dimensional chess and it’s all really about “winning” against China.

The failure of national security elites to update their priors makes them handmaidens of empire and oligarchy right now, but it also paves a future to something like fascism:

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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.

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!

“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.

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!