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.

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Red scares are manufactured moral panics that serve three purposes:

• Justify military buildups

• Repress political enemies

• Weaken organized labor

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Red Scares 1.0-5.0

The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 sparked fears of communism among American capitalists,1 who, from the start of US involvement in World War One through about 1921, deliberately stoked a moral panic about communism to engage in authoritarian practices. In the name of combating “communism,” the US state proceeded to suppress free speech, repress organized labor, deport migrants at scale, and even militarily invade Russia in 1918 (as part of a multilateral imperialist coalition).

This period of Orwellian unfreedom, which usually gets condensed into the Palmer Raids from November 1919 to January 1920, is known as the first “Red Scare.”2

The Second Red Scare spanned roughly 1947 to 1954—an anti-communist moral panic that broke the New Deal coalition. Although often referred to as “McCarthyism,” which you’ve surely heard of, it mostly took place in the years just prior to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s show trials and guilt-by-association, life ruining accusations against socialists, progressives, feminists, gays, and Jews. Thousands of technocrats implementing Roosevelt’s New Deal were purged from public life. Hollywood blacklisted screenwriters, actors, producers, and directors with ties to the Communist Party of the USA, which a decade earlier had been one of the leading organizations in American life advocating for civil rights, gender equality, labor unions.

This Second Red Scare also broke and reconfigured organized labor. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, one of the key legislative tools of the Second Red Scare, required union leaders to forswear communist ties of any kind. Consequently, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (the “CIO” part of AFL-CIO) had to purge 11 major unions for supposed communist ties. Even bracketing off the democratic disenfranchisement of weakening labor in this way, the move also co-opted US organized labor into the national security state’s global war against labor unions. Anti-communism was the mask of an imperial domination that, by design, came at workers’ expense.

The Third Red Scare was a historical blip in 1976, more manufactured even than the prior two. Because organized labor was a shell of its former self by this time, there was little need to use another moral panic to discipline workers into passive subjects of exploitation; that job was mostly complete. Instead, the point of this Third Red Scare, which found expression as the re-establishment of the Committee on the Present Danger, was explicitly about justifying large military buildups on the basis of delusional assessments of Soviet power.

And this Third Red Scare wasn’t just comprised of obscure conspiracy theorists with money. It was led by familiar historical (albeit right-wing) names—Paul Nitze, Richard Pipes, Paul Wolfowitz, William Van Cleave, and even George H.W. Bush as CIA Director. By scaring their way into more money for the Pentagon, they were doing their part to promote the perils of military Keynesianism while also actively lobbying against US-Soviet arms control efforts—specifically SALT II.

The Fourth Red Scare came in 2004, when the Committee on the Present Danger was again dug up to prosecute the Global War on Terror. This red scare is rarely recognized as such because it was a fight against both the Islamic world and the idea of terrorism (a tactic)—not communism. But the founders of the new Committee self-consciously identified the War on Terror as sharing DNA with the anti-communist campaign of the Cold War. They thought the War on Terror was a problem that must be fought unrestrained, at the expense of citizens’ rights, and that also meant a large military buildup that would come at the expense of using government resources for the general welfare of the people.

The Fifth Red Scare came in 2019, when reactionary conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney and Steve Bannon formally reconstituted the Committee on the Present Danger to counter the supposed existential threat of China. As part of this elite fever dream, the Congress created the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition. The FBI launched the racist “China Initiative.” The State Department formally established “China House”—an office intended not just to coordinate China policy but to ensure it imposed a zero-sum lens on all action and analysis. And on and on.

You might have scarcely heard of Bannon’s red-scare Committee being reformed, and you almost certainly never heard the media talking about a red scare in America between 2019 and 2024. That’s because mainstream liberals and Democratic Party leadership were some of the leading agents of making this red scare a reality.

I don’t need to re-litigate the damage of this Fifth Red Scare here because 1) we’re still living in it, and 2) I wrote an entire book about it with Mike Brenes called The Rivalry Peril—the only book I know of that documents and critiques US China policy in terms of the red-scare politics it unleashed.

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Red Scare 6.0 Is Here

But since Charlie Kirk’s shooting last year, we’ve been in a slow-building Sixth Red Scare that Project 2025 foreshadowed, as did Trump’s presidential campaign if you were able to parse signal from noise.

I have to admit I’m surprised at how this is coming together. I knew—and bet—that the anti-China red scare would be the load-bearing pillar of Trump 2.0’s moral panic on behalf of oligarchy and the military-industrial complex. That’s in evidence with the trillion-dollar war machine—which justifies its resourcing on the basis of imagined wars with China. With hyper-scale investments in AI and critical minerals-extraction regimes (which soak up too much capital and move too fast to regulate it because the US must “beat” China, whatever that means). And with Trump’s grand accusation last week that China stole the election from him for “Beijing Biden” in 2020.

What I did not expect was that this anti-China stream of moral panic would converge with a moral panic about literal (and effectively non-existent) communism and “far-left terrorism”—true fever dream shit.

Marco Rubio is enlisting the national security state in a project of counter-revolution, which I’ve been warning about since 2024. They’re issuing subpoenas and investigating nonprofits that range from Black Lives Matter to peace in Gaza and everything in between. They’re sentencing non-violent ICE protestors with terrorism charges. They’re harassing union leaders (the DOJ just launched a grand jury investigation into UAW president Shawn Fain on the basis of nothing). They’re announcing that leftists who are not US citizens will be denied visa travel abroad, and even US citizens can expect harassment and targeted surveillance.

Most telling of all, they’re using government statements and documents to make accusations of subversion and treason without evidence. Rubio’s State Department issued the dumbest and least credible report in the history of the US government about Cuba as the “Capital of 21st Century Communism.”

In that report, they blame Cuba for leading a global effort to subvert and overthrow the US government. They attribute every positive progressive movement in US history the past 40 years to Cuban “foreign influence.” And they attempt to link—again, without evidence, only accusation and rhetorical manipulation—revolutionary Cuba to a who’s who of MAGA’s political enemies.

The list includes Congresswoman Maxine Waters, two liberal (not communist) mayors of Los Angeles, Zohran Mamdani, Amy Goodman who hosts Democracy Now!, Hasan Piker, the Amazon Labor Union, and a bevy of peace organizations. There’s not a single communist on the list, and they can’t seem to distinguish liberals from progressives from socialists—it makes you think that maybe they don’t care.

All red scares are dumb.

All red scares are violently anti-democratic.

All red scares benefit demagogic right-wing politicians.

All red scares benefit moneyed interests.

All red scares weaken organized labor.

We are in a new red scare.

At some point, a pathology appears often enough that we must see it as a feature, not a bug, of American politics. If you’re reading this, you or people in your life are who will decide what happens next. Elites and people of means have an outsized role to play in either inflaming or smothering red-scare politics. Previous red scares only came to an end because people, sooner or later, refused them.

So we must all refuse this concocted moral panic with our minds, with our art, with our bodies, with our labor. I hope people can find the intestinal fortitude that has been in short supply in recent years. Because everything is at stake, again.

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The guy from outer space / and the guy with orange face / make it easy for the comrades to shake y’all asses awake.

—“November to Remember,” Bambu

One of the most important books ever written about nuclear weapons came from the pen of a philosopher and literary critic, not a nuclear scholar. Elaine Scarry’s 2014 Thermonuclear Monarchy is ignored by 95% of the people who consider themselves nuclear experts—to the disrepute of their profession. Scarry argues in a dozen persuasive ways that nuclear weapons are fundamentally anti-democratic.

Who can deny it?

In recent years, I’ve found myself coming to the same conclusion—nukes are “despotic weapons of terror whose existence perpetuates all kinds of insecurity.” And I suppose that puts my view of nuclear weapons in dialogue with not only Scarry but also George Orwell, who wrote in October 1945, just after the US nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that:

ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance.

So long as we remain in a “nuclear age” at all, we remain under the thumb of tyrannical national security states capable of erasing us—without consent—in a New York minute.

In an interview with Scarry that I share with my students each year, she says, consistent with Orwell:

Every new weapon changes the nature of warfare, but nuclear weapons have changed the nature of government. And changed what we can do. So much follows from the powerless position we’ve been put in.

Indeed.

My only asterisk would be that nukes are the most gratuitous version of the disempowerment that all things “national security” does to us now. The common person has no voice whatsoever on matters of war, genocide, or dispossession—especially when it’s done in their name. That’s plain for all to see when it comes to nuclear war, but is equally true of non-nuclear war-making and military buildups too.

Our forced helplessness came up when I spoke last week at The Public Advisory Committee on Disarmament and Arms Control. An audience member, frustrated at a feeling that nuclear experts and policy elites are simply presiding over a world moving further away from nuclear disarmament, asked what could be done to thwart the Nuclear Extremists and the lanyard-class lackeys who normalize them. How can anyone in that room—or any room where people ask “two-finger” questions—stop the drift toward nuclear abyss?

My off-the-cuff reply was that we need a mass movement, which means a popular consciousness against nuclear weapons and militarism (which are interdependent—the argument I was there to present). The Nuclear Freeze Movement during the 1980s was in the streets by the millions and saturated popular culture. Politicians must be made to feel like they have to do something about the problem; that they lack legitimacy and risk political instability unless they do something.

All of that is missing today. Why?

The hollowing out of what people think of as the middle class has destroyed the socio-economic base of activism in the global North. The project of nuclear disarmament itself got 1) professionalized and removed from popular conversation, and 2) decoupled from the problem of militarism of which it’s inherently a part. And popular art about nuclear weapons these days usually has some weird cultural militarism baked in, as if to say, “Yes, nuclear weapons are horrible but geez, there is no alternative. Maybe the answer is more missile defense.”

We do need to bring back the Nuclear Freeze Movement, or its spiritual kin.1 But something else that Scarry said in her interview makes me worry that even that is no longer enough:

In his autobiography Gandhi says, “You can wake a man only if he is really asleep; no effort that you may make will produce any effect upon him if he is merely pretending sleep.” And I think the big question for nuclear activists is, is the American population asleep or is it pretending to be asleep?

If it’s asleep, I think everybody can be awakened by just tapping—certain true facts put in front of them, such as the overwhelming fact that nuclear weapons are not a residue of the Cold War. These weapons are being modernized and kept up and replenished at every moment. If the country is pretending to be asleep, then some other strategies have to be found, and I don’t know what they are.

Everyone is aware of the grand existential problems facing humanity—the climate crisis, genocides, pandemics, and nuclear war. It doesn’t seem to matter. Are people so self-interested that they’re incapable of enlightened self-interest?

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It might be that they need the story of nuclear threat told differently, or that they need to be awakened to how nuclear-related harms already impose on their life. There are a hundred ways that nukes make the life of the average person worse and they probably don’t realize it. Perhaps if somebody connects those dots, the nuclear-disarmament imperative will land differently than it has the past 40 years.

But if, as Scarry implies, the American population is only pretending to be asleep—if they mistakenly believe that nuclear war can be quarantined “over there,” or that perpetually living on the cusp of extinction is, perversely, the only way to prevent extinction—then we are beyond consciousness-raising.

In that case, nuclear disarmament activists have only two recourses.

One would be to confront the things that have held back the disarmament movement: Economic inequality, the technocratization of nuclear concerns, cultural jingoism, and above all militarism.

The other, complementary path requires muscles that the nuclear movement never fully developed—noncooperation. A politics of refusal aimed at the machinery of death. We must withdraw our labor and consumption from systems that hold our existence at risk without our consent.

We must, in other words, give “nuclear strike” an entirely different meaning. The fight for a world without nuclear weapons is a fight to recover democracy. If you don’t win the former, you shouldn’t expect the latter.

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Bang-Bang

A House of Dynamite (2025) w/ Scott Sagan | Ep. 54

Van and Lyle are joined by nuclear weapons and disarmament expert Scott Sagan to discuss A House of Dynamite, the 2025 political thriller that imagines nuclear catastrophe not as spectacle or obvious madness, but as an orderly sequence of decisions made under crushing time pressure. Structured as interlocking vignettes rather than a single command-room …

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7 months ago · 1 like · Van and Lyle are Bang-Bang

Marco Rubio hosted a 60-nation meeting to promote the fake threat of “far-left terrorism.” It’s a greater danger than war, and evokes the Cold War in stupidly predictable ways that says something about the national security state.

Trump’s speech to the nation claiming that China stole the election from him is a farce, and an excuse to use the power of the state against his political enemies. I warned about this in my 2025 book with Mike Brenes, The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy—truly the only book that can explain why Trump is hanging his anti-democratic project on China in ways that even China experts don’t seem to grasp.

What’s bringing back the repression politics of the Cold War? A primer on how “great-power competition” facilitates political repression. How rivalry then and now created an anti-democratic political terrain at home and abroad. And why geopolitics today is racial in a way that it wasn’t against the Soviet Union.

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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I have an essay out in Dame Magazine calling for a progressive reformation against war. In it, I try to jar us into updating our priors about America and its role in the world by exposing the reader to bits of the often un-narrated brutality of US foreign policy. The US security state is like a child incapable of admitting wrongdoing. In its refusal of responsibility, it necessarily fails to learn anything; a tragic spiral.

The problem of American militarism is at the heart of global darkness. Getting right with the world means relating to it peacefully. The essay explains the strategic logic of least-harm; the political formations that make this alternative viable; and the blueprint for how to actually do it via policy.

The message is as simple as it is urgent: No peace, no democracy or equality. ✌️

What If American Power is The Problem?

By Van Jackson, July 15, 2026

Every day smuggles fresh horrors into our timelines, from war crimes to wage theft to the growing government repression of peace protests.

U.S. extraterritorial claims to Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal foreshadow a grim future, but the deeds of US foreign policy consist of a growing list of already actualized nightmares. In the past 24 months, the U.S. has directly attacked or materially supported bombings in Ecuador, Somalia, Haiti, Nigeria, Yemen, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and the Caribbean. A blockade of Cuba—an act of war—continues to ripen the island nation for an invasion in search of a rationale that would square it with the “national interest.” All the while, the Gaza genocide that U.S. foreign policy underwrites hums ominously in the background like so many data centers.

Small wonder that world net approvals of “U.S. leadership” are at a record low (-15 percent) while most Americans (59 percent) reported in April 2026 that “America’s best days have passed.” It all tempts wistful yearnings for the world of yesterday.

But there never was a Pax Americana.

Today’s violence looks less exceptional in light of what the world inherited from the post-Cold War era of American dominance: A legacy of unrepaired harm and poor judgment. Whatever achievements U.S. foreign policy can claim—AIDS medicine to Africa, slowing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—they are not the seed corn of the present; a history of militarism is. Only by seeing that can we design something better. There is no security in redirecting insecurity toward others.

A BLOODY UNIPOLAR MOMENT

To live through the ’90s meant witnessing the rise of coffee chains and erotic thrillers, grunge and the golden age of hip-hop. It also meant taking for granted something unprecedented: An extreme concentration of global power in the hands of a single nation-state that faced no serious threats abroad.

It was never meant to last. As Ta-Nehisi Coates lamented in The Message, “the privilege of a great power is incuriosity about those who lack it.” The trouble all along was the failure of Washington elites to see at whose expense America’s “unipolar moment” came; a blind spot that ensured its undoing. Middle-class comforts in the metropole masked a darker reality fermenting underneath the veneer of stability at history’s end…

Keep reading for free at Dame Magazine…

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I rocked up to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade today to deliver remarks at The Public Advisory Committee on Disarmament and Arms Control (PACDAC)—an entity mandated by anti-nuclear legislation in New Zealand from 1987. As far as crowds go, this was a friendly one—plenty of government workers, but ones trying as best they can to advance disarmament and arms control.

Anyone who knows me knows I can’t stand being in government environments. The bland-fanatical art of saying words that mean nothing. The cloistered conservatism of government culture. The necktie as a noose. The contradiction of being an elite who acts like an elite and thinks like an elite but tells himself that he’s a “servant” of the people. Kill me.

Rosa Luxemburg said,

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

I never felt more unfree than the moment I started having independent, critical thoughts about foreign policy yet was still trapped in the system as one of its makers. That is not a position you want to find yourself in.

Anyway, my remarks aimed to drive home a single point: The ability to reduce the dangers of nuclear war depends on getting rich-country militarism under control. Focusing on nukes alone will not get it done. Because all of our governments have failed at this, the world is darker and risks getting much darker still. Is there even a bottom?

The Nuclear Extremists are destroying everything and justifying it on the grounds that China is a threat to Western supremacy. The world is a village; the Nuclear Extremists will burn it in order to save it.

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Remarks before The Public Advisory Committee on Disarmament and Arms Control (PACDAC), as delivered (mostly—I had to remove a couple very spicy paragraphs at the end for time).

14 JULY 2026, Wellington

Some of you might be familiar with the late scholar-activist Randy Forsberg. She led the Nuclear Freeze Movement in the 1980s, which played a pretty large role in ending the Cold War. And I want to share a quote from what she wrote in 1984 about the movement she was involved in because her strategic insight sits underneath several of the themes of this panel.

She said,

it has been and will continue to be impossible to make deep cuts in nuclear arsenals until we have come to grips with the problem of ending conventional warfare. Unless the long-term objectives of arms control efforts are substantially expanded and strengthened, arms control negotiations will continue to achieve exactly what they now seek: the bilateral management of a permanent technological arms race.

I’ve been heartened by the Pacific practitioners of disarmament and arms control I’ve met in recent years, but most people who work on arms control today in the US and Asia specifically are doing almost nothing that you could call nuclear restraint. I worked in that world as a policy practitioner, and it was one of the things I became most disillusioned about. It’s actually one of the reasons I find myself here.

The name “arms control” implies you’re creating new regimes and arrangements and entanglements to bridle the most horrific weapon ever made…but the West’s (and East Asia’s) arms controllers are instead presiding over the slow death of existing arms control architecture. It’s become a conservative vocation in the US and East Asia, and I don’t mean that as a complement.

This audience is already well acquainted with the facts, but let me estrange you from them slightly. The Trump presidency has been a permissive environment for nuclear extremists in the US to kill arms control as we know it. In 2002, they got George W. Bush to kill the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Under Trump 1.0, they killed the INF Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty.

With Trump’s announcement on October 30 last year ordering the resumption of nuclear testing, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is under threat. And the day after that announcement, on October 31, 2025, the US, for the first time, was the only “no” vote on an annual UN First Committee resolution on the global moratorium on nuclear testing.

And then just a few months ago, on February, 5, they’ve now killed New START treaty with Russia too.

I worked with some of these nuclear extremists in a past life—they’ve spent decades wanting all this. A bunch of these dudes—and they’re mostly dudes—served in the first Trump administration, and they argued to resume nuclear testing back in 2019. Back then, their argument was that a rapid nuclear test—a bolt from the blue—would put pressure on Russia and China to undertake a three-way arms control process. That’s a farce, and the irony of that is that these selfsame nuclear extremists opposed a trilateral arms control process too!

Ultimately, these folks are aiming to kill the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) and, by a thousand cuts, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty too. The nuclear extremists have a project of seeking American primacy in a world where that’s no longer possible. And because of that, they want to be totally unencumbered, and they don’t care what consequences others might have to eat in the process.

We’re living in Randy Forsberg’s nightmare—and it’s because her most basic insight has been lost to history.

Conventional arms buildups and the risks associated with nuclear weapons are mutually constituted. None of our governments are operating foreign policy on the basis of that understanding. And that’s a problem because if you do not get conventional militarism under control, you will not make any durable progress toward arms control, to say nothing of nuclear disarmament.

We find ourselves in 2026 feeling like the NPT is under threat. And how could it not be when all these other regimes of nuclear restraint are either dead or suffering puncture wounds from so many violations of the basic premise of nuclear restraint? The health of the NPT depends on its embeddedness in a global regime of nuclear restraint, the crown jewel of which is the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The NPT feels fragile because everything other than the TPNW is being crushed under the weight of militarism.

It’s not a coincidence that world military spending is up for 11 years in a row. That the US has unilaterally abrogated all these arms control arrangements in parallel with spiking its own military spending to something like 38% of global spending. It’s not a coincidence that, in that context, China is expanding its nuclear capabilities. And the increase in Chinese warheads and Chinese missile silos followed—not predated—America’s $1.7 trillion in nuclear modernization, which for what it’s worth, started in the Obama administration that I worked for.

And it’s also not a coincidence that the South Pacific Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone is much smaller than it might be because the Micronesian region is mostly excluded from it. Micronesia is saturated with American military installations, forces, and capabilities, including nuclear weapons. Micronesian governments are mostly not part of the Treaty because the US won’t allow it. So by a defiant miracle, you have the Marshall Islands signing the Treaty of Rarotonga in March last year, but that was before Trump’s nuclear testing announcement on October 30, and this US administration will not allow the Marshall Islands to ratify the Treaty.

And you ignore what I’m saying here at our collective peril. China’s submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) test over the Pacific last week got a lot of press, a lot of government statements criticizing China—and rightly so. But what good is condemnation without explanation? The US uses its military dominance of the Pacific to plan an essentially unwinnable war against China, and in service of those war preparations, the US sets off 5-10 ICBMs and SLBMs in the Marshall Islands every year. If you don’t want Chinese militarism to reach the Pacific—and I sure as hell don’t—you can’t have the Pacific be a site for American militarism and Australian militarism and eventually New Zealand militarism.

We have been paying a price for ignoring Randy Forsberg’s insight: Reducing the risks associated with nuclear weapons requires reducing conventional arms buildups and militarization.

And this is why I think we (New Zealand) are making a massive mistake by ingratiating ourselves with a declining superpower that’s no longer hegemonic, that no longer provides global public goods, and that’s throwing off new levels of violence and flagrant war crimes every month. And we (New Zealand) are using what resources and diplomatic capital we have to morally underwrite—to legitimate and collaborate with—a predatory, revisionist power of the first order.

So what is to be done?

There’s more I could say about this, but to put it perhaps undiplomatically, if you recognize that the risks of nuclear war are bound up with processes of militarization and geopolitical rivalry, you would be a fool to sign up to being a force multiplier, to sign a military space cooperation agreement, to agree to a minerals extraction “partnership” that pumps your natural resources directly into America’s war machine. You’d be a fool to depend on that country’s technology solutions.

And the New Zealand Defence Force would be wrongfooted with the goal of arms control and disarmament if its primary drive was “remilitarization” and acquiring naval capabilities that have no real function other than warfighting against New Zealand’s largest trading partner.

Nuclear dangers are growing as a symptom of the global North’s military solutionism, and America’s rivals have been reacting in kind and will continue to do so. And that’s not in New Zealand’s interest, and that’s not in the interests of a Pacific peace.

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Why we’re seeing a rise in geopolitical gambling, speculation, and insider trading.

Why the Iran War ceasefire was always going to fail, and the real reasons (there are three!) Trump even bothered with a ceasefire in the first place.

How to make sense of China’s submarine-launched ballistic missile test over the Pacific, and why anti-imperialism is the only solution.

Peter Thiel calls Pope Leo a Chinese communist agent—The Rivalry Peril is as timely as ever.

And the devastation over the Graham Platner scandal.

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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They’re scum … they’re led by sick people and they’re vicious, violent people. There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.

Trump has declared the ceasefire with Iran “over.” But it was never any more of a ceasefire than Israel’s “ceasefire” in Gaza.

We’re all Charlie Brown to Trump’s Lucy with the football. Maybe next time, if we just praise Dear Leader’s unearned and capricious gestures toward peace, he’ll really stick to the ceasefire—countermanding all the warmongers he happily surrounds himself with whose advice he takes every day.

I’m on record expressing deep skepticism about the recent Memorandum of Understanding between Iran and the US even as I cheered for it. Constructed out of papier-mâché, it deferred on the most important questions and empowered Israel as spoiler because it promised the IDF would withdraw from occupying Lebanon even though Israel agreed to no such thing. But I publicly supported the MOU anyway—knowing that it was destined to blow away in the wind—because the ceasefire was (and remains) an urgent priority.

This is the eternal recursive trap of an antiwar advocate in a world run by demons.

The thing that makes me want to hurl household objects at the wall is the credulous and narrowly technical way that 99% of public-facing personalities engage with the Iran War. Sports announcer-like play-by-plays obscure more understanding than they reveal. The media’s attempt to sound neutral in the face of flagrant lies papering over illegal mass murder brings shame to a profession whose only future seems to be in manufacturing consent for oligarchic interests. And don’t get me started on the national-security commentariat.

The Iran War constitutes a series of violent imperial crimes. And we must retain the “imperial” adjective lest we erase the larger material forces that gave rise to the crimes. But crimes against whom?

Against Iranians foremost—between 3,500 and 6,000 Iranians dead, more than 26k injured, and Iran’s economy in smoldering ruins.

Against the world, which has been forced to eat dramatic increases (>24% on average) in energy prices and food inflation—the kind of spike that kills off the most vulnerable and softens up the precarious middle class to appeals from far-right demagogues. The kind of worldmaking that becomes an excuse for liberal governments to steal resources from the people as they tell tales that justify military spending at the expense of the welfare of the governed.

And against the American people, too.

The Pentagon admits to 13 US troops killed, and 425 wounded in action (the numbers are undoubtedly higher than this). The war has already directly cost US taxpayers $103 billion in 120 days while the cost of everything rises and government spending on welfare and healthcare falls off a cliff. Trump said it himself, “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things…We’re fighting wars.” And the tab is still running.

We are all made to be sacrifices at an altar of nonsense and theft. Some more than others.

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Still, there is a strategic rationale for all the bloodletting that any sane person would oppose but that serves both oligarchs and the national security state but essentially nobody else: America’s North Star in the Middle East remains Israel’s regional primacy and that means taking military measures to weaken Iran. If only we could have understood this from the start, we would have known that the Iran War was meant to be permanent. That what Trump branded a “ceasefire” was what Hegseth admitted was a strategic pause for “reloading.”

It’s not just that Trump was stupid enough to be conned into doing a war that Netanyahu failed to convince every president in the 21st century to do. It’s that unleashing ebbs and flows of bombing against Iran from now until forever prevents Iran from seriously challenging Israeli primacy in the Middle East; the inter-state version of the profoundly impoverished-yet-evil Israeli theory of “mowing grass.”

To be sure, there have been setbacks. Iran has proven itself more powerful than Washington jingoes imagined. In fact, the war has exposed how the global power projection that remains the Quixotic aim of American militarism is no longer technically possible. But that doesn’t matter if the larger point is perpetuating Epstein geopolitics or fulfilling the millenarian vision of white supremacists and Zionists.

As long as US politicians keep the American national security state tightly bound to the state of Israel, there will be no change to Washington’s investiture in Israeli primacy as a constituent part of American primacy. And as long as that primacy construct doesn’t change, the US will continue to face the “need” to keep Iran weak relative to an Israel that literally kills people to manipulate the balance of power in the Middle East and facilitate the Nazi-like idea of a “Greater Israel.”

So next time a US president calls for a ceasefire with Iran, take a look at American munitions stockpiles and oil reserves. I bet they’re running low. Take a look at the oil futures market and Polymarket. I bet they’re insider trading on it. Take a look at stocks and the bond market. I bet investors are selling.

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Editor’s Note: This guest post is a memoir essay by Charles Knight, a friend whose career has spanned Vietnam War protests, the Nuclear Freeze Movement, and the co-founding of a think tank—the Project for Defense Alternatives, which specialized in “non-offensive defense” strategizing. Charles and I were social media mutuals, exchanged messages on a few occasions, and had some Zoom calls about the arms-control-and-disarmament world of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and early War on Terror.

Then, in 2024, I let him know I’d be in his neck of the woods (Boston area) as I criss-crossed the US promoting my book, Grand Strategies of the Left: The Foreign Policy of Progressive Worldmaking. He kindly offered to drive me from Yale’s campus in New Haven to UMass, several hours away. The experience was like something you read about. Our parasocial connections made it feel like catching up with an old friend even though it was our first time meeting in person. What followed during our drive was an illuminating chat about working-class politics in the ‘70s and ‘80s, feminism within the New Left, who killed nuclear disarmament, defense conversion, and the complications of a “progressive” think tank collaborating with a libertarian one…

Anyway, the idea of “non-offensive defense” (NOD) was the heart of our connection—not merely “cutting the military budget,” but rather cutting it in ways that limited the military to securing territorial defense, not geopolitical advantage, thereby transforming international politics. At one point in the conversation, Charles mentioned how Gorbachev had embraced certain NOD proposals, and in so doing actually helped end the Cold War. In everything I’d read about how the Cold War ended, I had never thought to question where Gorbachev’s ideas of unilateral restraint and militarily retrenchment came from, or why the US failed to reciprocate.

After that trip, I went down a rabbit hole researching NOD’s rich literature, which nobody in security studies today (save Matt Evangelista) even knows exists. I aim to fix that. NOD is a crucial bridge between disarmament and the status quo, between peace and Washington’s militarism.

The full essay appears below, but the length might be truncated if you’re reading it in e-mail. You can also download the full essay as a PDF here:

260701 Beyond Pleasant Lunches

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Beyond Pleasant Lunches: How Independent Research and New Ideas Played a Role In Ending the Cold War

A retrospective on the years 1987-1989

July 2026

Charles Knight, Co-Founder, Project for Defense Alternatives

1. Introductory Note

When I began researching and writing about military policy reform in the second half of the 1980s, I was not naïve about how easy it would be to make change. I understood that the field I was entering was conservative and the norms of policy discussion were well-guarded and entrenched. Access to decision-makers was difficult, at best. It was far from certain that my efforts would have any material effect on state institutions, security systems, military interventions, and wars.

When yet another war broke out, as it often did, I had moments when I felt, “What’s the point of all this work?” I found that I could ease my doubts by chronicling and curating critical analytical reporting and analysis of the current war. This role came rather naturally to me as a former publisher.

In the case of the 2003 Iraq war, the work that my colleague Carl Conetta and I did before, during, and after that war had an effect. I am confident that the combination of our own analytical reports and the large online archives/libraries we built (consisting of critical assessments and just plain good information and reporting by others) contributed meaningfully to that war’s subsequent bad reputation. A “bad war” often dissuades national leaders from rashly starting another, at least for a while.

This retrospective tells a different story. It explores how the independent development of new ideas (“alternatives”) for effective national security played a role in events that would prove world-changing by ending the Cold War.

The distinction I intend in using the word “independent” is that the research and thinking are pursued in a context largely outside any large state or private institution that sets the parameters of investigation, and, equally importantly, the work is free from direction for a particular instrumental use defined by others. I note that it is not unusual for researchers and thinkers working in institutional settings to find the time and energy beyond their work obligations to engage in “independent thinking and research.”

This story focuses on the work of one researcher/thinker from West Germany. It follows the migration of his thinking and writing (and that of a network he organized) to Mikhail Gorbachev’s key foreign policy advisers. Once there, this work likely played a role in shaping the particulars of one of the Soviet leader’s most consequential policy decisions.

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2. Brookline, Massachusetts, USA

I begin by situating myself adjacent to this story in 1987. That year, I became a research fellow at the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS), founded in 1980 and directed by Randall (Randy) Forsberg. She was well-known for articulating and advocating for a bilateral “freeze” of the nuclear forces of the USSR and the USA, sparking a popular movement. I was attracted to the bilateral freeze idea, and even more so to a related idea I had heard Randy speak about.

Randy argued that conventional military structures, especially those optimized for operational and strategic offensives, made escalation to nuclear use plausible, even likely, in the event of war. To counter this dynamic, she asserted that non-offensive restructuring and the reduction of conventional forces were essential to progress toward eliminating the very real threat of nuclear war.

Randall Forsberg understood the role of unilateral initiatives in reducing the heightened perception of insecurity that was endemic during the Cold War. She also believed in a leading role for bilateral and multilateral negotiated arms reductions.

One example of Randy’s efforts to advance conventional arms negotiations was her organizing an unofficial U.S. delegation of experts to travel to Moscow in September 1988 for several meetings with the Soviet experts at the USSR Academy of Sciences’ Institute for World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), with follow-up meetings with “high-ranking advisers” to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Foreign Ministry. The focus of these meetings was the upcoming Conventional Forces in Europe negotiations, which began in March 1989. The discussions in Moscow included frequent references on both sides to the roles of defensive restructuring and unilateral steps. [see Carl Conetta, rapporteur, “Joint US-Soviet Seminar on Conventional Arms Reduction in Europe”, January 1989.]

When I arrived at IDDS, I joined the Institute’s recently created project on Ground Forces Alternatives, focusing on reforming NATO’s conventional forces. To further this program, Forsberg was making sustained contact with the community of alternative defense theorists in Europe. Among these was Lutz Unterseher, living in Bonn, the West German capital. I have found a note in my files, dated June 17, 1987, about a call to Lutz (in which I was a participant) during which we planned a fall trip to Washington by Lutz for a briefing of Congress members organized by the Institute.

In these early days of introduction to Lutz and his work, I remained far from the action in Europe. It would be another year before I felt ready to advocate for alternative defense ideas, and even then, I did so in general terms.

In this retrospective, I recount the story of the transmission of Lutz’s military reform ideas from West to East, eventually arriving, in some form (as selected and digested by intermediaries), to the attention of Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Several of the advisers to Gorbachev whom I cite below frequented the Kremlin “room(s) where it happened.” Meanwhile, in 1987, Lutz was working from his home in Bonn. He was largely institutionally independent, though he had organized an intellectual network in 1980 called Studiengruppe Alternative Sicherheitspolitik (SAS), or Study Group on Alternative Security Policy, in English. SAS members were active and retired military personnel, defense analysts, political and social scientists, economists, mathematicians, physicists, lawyers, parliamentarians, and trade unionists from nine countries: Austria, Britain, Denmark, Germany (East and West), France, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States.

Lutz Unterseher and SAS were not the only ones working on alternative military doctrines and postures at the time. In Western Europe, in particular, there were a variety of ideas and designs for what was variously known as defensive, non-provocative, or non-offensive defense (NOD). Lutz called his variation confidence-building defense (C-BD).

By the second half of the 1980s, Moscow institutchiks working on the foreign policy reforms were aware of many of these strains of thought. Indeed, by 1987, something of an East-West epistemic community (a network of experts sharing theories, knowledge, and practice) emerged regarding arms control and ways to demilitarize East-West relations.

I am not attempting an overall historical examination in this essay. I focus on Unterseher and SAS because of my personal familiarity and a preference for this approach. During the 1990s, I would become a collaborator with Lutz and come to count him as a very good friend. He also invited me to join SAS.

Regarding my preference for the Unterseher variety of NOD, I appraise the Unterseher/SAS work to be the most comprehensive, providing:

· principles of confidence-building defense,

· schematics of the operational employment of forces,

· elucidating detailed illustrations of the force structure,

· composition of weaponry employed, and

· costs of acquisition, support, and maintenance of forces (including humans, arms, and operational supplies).

These qualities would have been of particular interest to Soviet specialists tasked with creating a credible proposal for the transformation of the USSR’s military posture toward “reasonably sufficiency” with “a defensive orientation”, as Gorbachev had, in early 1986, announced to the Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. At the top of Gorbachev’s many pressing concerns was the high percentage (15-25%) of Soviet GDP dedicated to the military sector.

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~~

3. Bonn, Federal Republic of Germany

In a memoir essay written in 2018, Pleasant Lunches: Western Track-Two Influence on Gorbachev’s Conventional Forces Initiative of 1998, Lutz tells the story of how, in January 1987, a Soviet Embassy attaché, Vladimir Semyonov, invited him to lunch during which Semyonov requested copies of unpublished papers on structural reform of conventional forces, presumably to send back to Moscow. Lutz surmised that Semyonov likely had a dual identity as a KBG agent (which turned out to be true). Since Unterseher worked only from open sources and was intent on creating conditions for peace in Europe, he decided in favor of analysts in Moscow gaining access to his work, even if the courier was a KGB agent.

The Pleasant Lunches memoir does not tell us who, back in Moscow, was requesting these papers. I think it is likely that Lutz never asked the attaché, because he knew no useful response would be forthcoming.

If the specific ideas of Lutz Unterseher or other Western non-offensive defense thinking influenced Gorbachev’s decisions, they would have worked their way up through several levels of the Moscow hierarchy.

Lutz also tells the story of a conference on “European Security and Non-offensive Defense” in Bulgaria he attended in October 1987. There, he worked with the East German mathematician Walter Romberg to prepare a paper that Romberg would then present on non-offensive defense (“in very concrete terms, down to the level of individual military formations, and how a process of reciprocal unilateral measures of restructuring and disarmament could be implemented”). Romberg’s talk was published in 1988 as “Towards non-offensive defense through unilateral, limited and reciprocated reductions: on a gradualistic approach to military crisis stability in Central Europe,” in European Security and Non-Offensive Defense, World Federation of Scientific Workers (ed.), Berlin (East). We can only speculate as to who might have read that article in Moscow.

~~

4. Moscow, USSR

When Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in March 1985, his primary focus was a reform agenda to address the serious problems in the Soviet economy that had first become manifest in the 1970s. In a public speech in May of 1985, Gorbachev spoke of stagnation and declining living standards while drawing attention to excessively large military expenditures. He began looking for multiple ways to make the case to the Soviet public and to his government (including the overall CPSU hierarchy and, of course, the Defense Ministry) that defense cuts were necessary and reasonable.

Part of his subsequent program was to pull Soviet forces back from foreign military deployments and interventions. He began with Afghanistan and then moved on to the reduction of Soviet Forces in the Warsaw Pact countries, while simultaneously negotiating with NATO countries for reductions of conventional and nuclear forces.

In 1986, he persuaded the Politburo (the supreme council of the CPSU) and Defense Ministry to formally accept the strategic goal of “sufficiency of defense” as an encompassing, if imprecise, concept Gorbachev could use to justify large defense-sector cuts.

His task then was to persuade and organize the Soviet government apparatus to make the transformation real. This required ongoing attention to developing and detailing the particulars of changes in defense posture and foreign commitments that would eventually benefit the economy.

Fast forward to December 7, 1988, when Gorbachev made a world-changing speech at the UN in which he announced, to the astonishment of both NATO-country and WTO-country leaders, the withdrawal of 50,000 troops from the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, including the withdrawal and disbandment of six tank divisions and assault landing/crossing units – military units of particular relevance to large-scale offensive operations. He also committed the Soviet Union to restructure those Soviet forces that would remain in WTO countries into defensive formations.

In the context of 13 years of negotiations that had not yet led to agreement on conventional arms reductions in Europe, this unilateral step was a radical move intended to supercharge momentum toward disarmament and, by extension, much improved East-West relations (aka “an end to the Cold War”).

A CIA Intelligence Assessment, “Gorbachev’s September Housecleaning: An Early Evaluation,” dated six days before the UN speech, includes these passages:

The West is likely to face greater Soviet foreign policy activism, including bold, possibly unilateral, moves designed to generate international support for Soviet positions.

[T]he leadership changes that occurred in September have already begun to affect a number of policy areas…increasing the likelihood of new initiatives in foreign and national security policies. Operating from a position of new strength, Gorbachev is likely to be even less predictable than before. This will pose a greater challenge for the West, as he seeks to keep the United States and NATO on the defensive with bold initiatives that are likely to have substantial propaganda value with Western publics. [italics mine]

It is striking that the CIA in 1988 assessed Gorbachev’s national security initiatives as a “greater challenge” for the U.S and NATO rather than an opportunity to end the Cold War.

The announcement of unilateral reductions and defensive restructuring of Soviet forces in Eastern Europe was also a radical change for the defense establishment in the Soviet Union, which remained skeptical about the strategic, operational, and tactical aspects of defensive restructuring and was deeply troubled by losing its privileged position in the competition for state funding.

Gorbachev’s domestic political problems were severe and growing in 1988. The records I have found do not make clear how many members of the Politburo had prior briefings on the specific provisions of the speech. We know he ran the particulars past his closest allies on the Politburo, Yakovlev and Shevardnadze, and a few others.

Stepping back a year and down a couple of rungs of the hierarchy, in 1987, Andrei Kokoshin was the deputy director of ISKAN (Institute of the USA and Canada of the USSR Academy of Sciences). ISKAN was the main advisory body to the Soviet government on policy regarding the United States and Canada. Kokoshin and his frequent collaborator, Major General Valentin Larionov of the General Staff Academy, were supplying analyses and researched policy options to Gorbachev and other members of the Politburo.

Unterseher cites Cornell historian Matthew Evangelista’s book Unarmed Forces, which includes the paragraph (p. 191):

[Andrei] Kokoshin was probably the Soviet scholar most attracted to and involved in transnational discussions of non-offensive defense. He was an active participant in [Anders] Boserup’s Pugwash group on conventional forces and followed the European debates closely. His views were particularly influenced by Unterseher’s work.

[Evangelista’s source: interview with Andrei Kokoshin in Moscow, November 1990.]

In 1988, Kokoshin and Larionov co-authored an article, “Confrontation of Conventional Forces in the Context of Ensuring Strategic Stability”, which includes this endnote:

A number of prominent West European (including West German) specialists believe that under conditions of the balance achieved between Warsaw Pact and NATO forces and the palpable relaxation of tensions in the international situation, the West could allow itself to take major unilateral steps toward changing over to exclusively defensive strategic alternatives in hope that they would evoke similar reciprocal steps from the Warsaw Pact. [italics mine]

Notable in the above quote is the idea of reciprocal unilateral steps, an aspect of the Unterseher approach that was relatively rare in Western circles. The historical irony was that it was the Soviet Union rather than NATO that was preparing to take the first unilateral steps.

Kokoshin’s immediate superior was Giorgii Arbatov, director of ISKAN.

While Kokoshin and/or Larionov may have personally briefed Gorbachev (I have found no clear evidence of such), it was probably Arbatov who had the greatest opportunity to present the findings of Kokoshin and Larionov’s research to Gorbachev. Arbatov may have provided similar briefings to other reform-minded Politburo members such as Aleksandr Yakovlev (Central Committee Secretary for Ideology) and Eduard Shevardnadze (Foreign Minister). Arbatov’s job also involved occasional briefings of Dmitry Yazov (Defense Minister and future participant in the August 1991 coup), as well as briefings for the Committee of State Security (KGB).

In these sorts of briefings, I can imagine Arbatov using some of Unterseher’s more detailed military-technical work (for instance, on the defense-efficient use of overlapping fields of fire from dispersed artillery emplacements) to reassure conservative military men that Mr. Gorbachev was serious about providing good military defenses for the Soviet Union. If this ever happened, such ideas would have likely been dressed up in a Russian uniform (so to speak).

During this period, Larionov and Kokoshin collaborated to resurface the ideas of General Aleksandr A. Svechin, who in the 1920s and 1930s had argued for defensive military strategies and operations as a viable option for Soviet forces. This was a smart political move by Kokoshin and Larionov in the context of Soviet nationalist culture, which strongly preferred Russian sources of discovery and ideas. No doubt, they also recognized that advancing German ideas on structuring forces and strategy would provoke emotion-laden skepticism among Soviet officers, many of whom were veterans of the Great War against Germany.

Another possible source of the request to Lutz Unterseher for his papers is Lev Mendelevich, Soviet Ambassador to Denmark beginning in 1984. In 1986, he returned to Moscow and became director of the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s Evaluation and Planning Directorate. At the ministry, Mendelevich’s boss was Eduard Shevardnadze.

While Ambassador to Denmark, Mendelevich pursued an interest in Western thinking on non-offensive defense, ordering his staff to collect literature, especially from Denmark and Germany. (Evangelista, pg. 189)

I have been unable to determine whether Kokoshin or Mendelevich arranged the Soviet attaché lunches with Unterseher in Bonn. Still, there is little doubt it was one or both. Here is a plausible scenario involving both Kokoshin and Mendelevich:

Kokoshin is well acquainted with Danish peace researcher Anders Boserup, having attended Pugwash conferences together. Boserup mentions Mendelevich’s interest in non-offensive defense to Kokoshin, who then contacts Mendelevich. Mendelevich offers to use his Foreign Ministry channels to collect unpublished papers from Unterseher. The pleasant lunches follow, and the Unterseher/SAS unpublished papers head east to Moscow in diplomatic pouches, to the attention of both Kokoshin and Mendelevich.

~~

5. My reflections on this story

In 1994, an article by Thomas Risse-Kappen appeared in International Organization entitled “Ideas do not float freely: transnational coalitions, domestic structures, and the end of the Cold War“.

I quote here several paragraphs from the article that are particularly relevant to this story:

[S]ome of the ideas that informed the reconceptualization of Soviet security interests and centered around notions of “common security” and “reasonable sufficiency” originated in the…community comprising arms control supporters in the United States as well as peace researchers and left-of-center political parties in Western Europe… [forming] transnational networks with “new thinkers” in the foreign policy institutes… Mikhail Gorbachev, as a domestic reformer and uncommitted thinker in foreign policy, was open to these ideas because they satisfied his needs for coherent and consistent policy concepts. As a result, the new ideas became causally consequential for the turnaround in Soviet foreign policy [emphasis mine].

[N]onoffensive defense was alien to traditional Soviet military thinking. In fact, the initial reaction of even civilian experts in the Soviet Union to the alternative defense debate in Western Europe had been quite hostile and turned more sympathetic in their publications only after Gorbachev had come into power [emphasis mine].

So, what does it take for “new ideas to become causally consequential”?

Risse-Kappen argues that the impact of ideas on international politics depends on the domestic structures and coalition-building processes within states. He posits that ideas require institutional “channels” and the support of powerful political actors to influence policy, rather than simply spreading on their own merit.

I agree with Risse-Kappen’s take regarding the field of international politics. Nation-states conduct international politics in a highly focused and hierarchical manner. “Great Powers”, in particular, have large, complex bureaucracies that often employ thousands to advance “state interests”. In terms of broad citizen participation, these institutions are minimally democratic, if at all. Their operations and procedures are carefully guarded and often performed in secrecy. Furthermore, the construction of “state interests” involves the preferences of a minuscule portion of the nation’s citizens. In the case of foreign and military policies, it makes little difference whether the state system is deemed democratic or authoritarian.

The Unterseher/SAS set of ideas was a particularly good fit with what Gorbachev needed. Gorbachev had already decided he needed to cut Soviet defense spending, in part by withdrawing a significant number of troops from Eastern Europe. He would rationalize this withdrawal by pointing out that offensive strategies require very costly combinations of force elements. Changing the Soviet war-fighting strategy from an emphasis on strategic and operational offensives to a “defense sufficiency” strategy would yield substantial resource savings for the Soviet Union. Unterseher had detailed this sort of defense structure and explained how it reduces resource demands, so there was a close fit to his “new thinking” and what Gorbachev needed.

Additionally, Gorbachev was in a hurry. The Soviet economic crisis worsened in the second half of the 1980s, at a time when Gorbachev needed to demonstrate success with his perestroika reform program. Even before Gorbachev came to power, the Soviets had been open to negotiations for “mutual and balanced” reductions in conventional forces in Europe. However, negotiations had dragged on for many years without resolution. Lutz Unterseher was one of the few Western security thinkers who believed unilateral reductions should be a tool to move significant disarmament and arms control forward, both through reciprocal measures and through negotiated treaties.

I conclude from this retrospective that for a national leader to look beyond well-known, well-understood ideas to new ones requires the leader’s assessment that the ideas already on hand are insufficient. The leader may then decide to look beyond their established foreign and military policy institutions, even seeking ideas abroad. This happens infrequently, but it does happen.

Why then do national leaders (and leaders of other large institutions) infrequently take up new ideas and use their power to operationalize them? The answer, I believe, is that such leaders have dozens of pressing matters on their agenda and that their experience has taught them that relentless pragmatism is the best stance in such a situation. Pragmatism then biases leaders toward a conservative attitude toward the new, particularly that which is outside the norm of their particular institution. Consequently, if they judge that they can “get by” with the status quo, they will often opt to ignore the new or radical.

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6. What I learned in researching and writing this retrospective

Like a child born into a large family, the birth, development, and “useful life” of new ideas are complicated.

For ideas to move from their peripheral invention and development to the “room(s) where it happens”, one must develop them well beyond theories and general principles. One must invest time in constructing convincing illustrations of how to apply the ideas in real-world situations, in calculating and assembling descriptions of the required resources, and in detailing the steps needed to operationalize the ideas.

Such “idea packages” or “idea complexes” will benefit from seeking constructive criticism from others and then taking time to refine the package. In this regard, the Studiengruppe Alternative Sicherheitspolitik was particularly valuable in the development of confidence-building defense ideas.

Because an idea finds use in one situation doesn’t mean it will prove useful in others, at least, not on the timeline one might wish for. The idea may still turn out to be part of what unfolds over time.

The ego may whine and protest, but it is not a tragedy if an idea “is before its time.” The vast majority of useful ideas are built on foundations laid by others. If a creation doesn’t find takers now, it may well become part of a new idea package that finds its way into the “room(s) where it happens” in the decades to come. An amazing societal change may result, although in the present it can only be faintly imagined.

If one finds inspiration in the fantasy that some powerful leader, institution, or political movement will take up the idea and make history, it is best not to allow such dreams become an essential part of one’s commitment to the work.

It is advisable to work ideas because their creation and refinement nourish one’s soul and bring pleasure. If one can get paid along the way, all the better.

Meanwhile, enjoy the good work!

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7. Bibliography

Adler, Emanuel, “The Emergence of Cooperation: National Epistemic Communities and the International Evolution of the Idea of Nuclear Arms Control,” International Organization (special issue) 46 (winter 1992): 101-45.

Arbatov, Georgii, “About the Results of the Moscow Summit and Their Impact on U.S. Foreign Policy and Soviet-American Relations”, June 1, 1988 memo to Gorbachev, National Security Archive, George Washington University.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Nonoffensive Defense” (Special Issue), Vol. 44, 1988. Articles by Dmitri Yazov, Anders Boserup, Lutz Unterseher, Andrei Kokoshin, Randall Forsberg, among others.

Chernyaev, A.S. (notes), “Gorbachev Conference with advisers, October 31, 1988, ‘What are we going to take to the United Nations?’ Attended: Shevardnadze, Yakovlev, Dobrynin, Falin, Chernyaev,” National Security Archive, George Washington University.

Central Intelligence Agency, Assessment, “Gorbachev’s September Housecleaning: An Early Evaluation”, December 1, 1988, National Security Archive, George Washington University.

Conetta, Carl, rapporteur, “Joint US-Soviet Seminar on Conventional Arms Reduction in Europe”, conference report, Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, January 1989.

Conetta, Carl, Charles Knight & Lutz Unterseher: ‘Toward Defensive Restructuring in the Middle East‘, Bulletin of Peace Proposals, vol. 22, no. 2 (June 1991), pp. 115-134

Conetta, Carl & Lutz Unterseher, “Confidence-Building Defense: a comprehensive approach to security and stability in the new era,” Project on Defense Alternatives and Studiengruppe Alternative Sicherheitspolitik, May 1994.

Conetta, Carl & Charles Knight, “Principles for Building Confidence and Stability into National Defenses and International Security – toward sufficient, affordable, robust, and reliable defense postures,” Project on Defense Alternatives, March 15, 2022.

Dean, Jonathan. “Alternative Defence: Answer to NATO’s Central Front Problems?” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs, vol. 64, no. 1, 1987, pp. 61–82. JSTOR.

Evangelista, Matthew, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War, Cornell University Press, 1999.

Gates, David. “Supporters and Models of Non-Offensive Defence“, in Non-Offensive Defence: An Alternative Strategy for NATO? London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1991: 58-70.

Gorbachev, Mikhail, “Address at the United Nations, New York, December 7, 1988,” Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, Moscow, 1988

Grin, John & Lutz Unterseher, The Spiderweb Defense, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol 44, 1988.

Kokoshin, Andrei & Valentin Larionov, “Confrontation of Conventional Forces in the Context of Ensuring Strategic Stability”, originally published in 1988, subsequently published in English in Brauch & Kennedy, Alternative Conventional Defense Postures in the European Theater, Taylor & Francis, 1992

Møller, Bjørn, Resolving the Security Dilemma in Europe: the German debate on non-offensive defence, Brassey’s (UK).

Project on Defense Alternatives, Confidence-Building Defense, collection of 29 PDA/SAS articles, years 1988-2026.

Risse-Kappen, Thomas, “Ideas do not float freely: transnational coalitions, domestic structures, and the end of the Cold War,” International Organization, (spring 1994): 185-214.

Uhl, Matthias, “The Armed Forces in Germany in the Changed Soviet Defence Strategy under Gorbachev”, 2021. DOI:10.13109/9783666311277.95

Unterseher, Lutz, “Pleasant Lunches: Western Track-Two Influence on Gorbachev’s Conventional Forces Initiative of 1988”, PDA Guest Publication, 2018.

Unterseher, Lutz, “Variables of War”, PDA Guest Publication, January 1, 2026.

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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!

My first jiu-jitsu coach is not someone I (any longer) take advice from. The memes he shares on Facebook betray a mind palace filled with conspiracy theory, tacky American-flag clothing, and pro-capitalist propaganda. Still, on the mats, he passed on many insights that have served me well:

• Practice makes what? Perfect? No, habit. Practice makes habit.

• Try harder by resisting less. Be open to the possibilities that emerge from each new constraint.

• Good people should be dangerous.

It’s this latter point—good people should be dangerous—that comes to mind on the Fourth of July, a holiday that celebrates a revolution in a country whose entire existence suppresses revolutionary impulses and demands (and in 2026, that suppression is happening in a revolutionary conjuncture).

A big supporter of The Un-Diplomatic Project (pod and newsletter) confided recently that he thought we should be more embracing of the “R” word. In the sense of “Assata’s Code,” of a transformation of how we relate to one another, I get it. I think that’s how he meant it. But, depending on what you mean, revolution also raises the specter of violence on behalf of something other than self-defense. If I criticize empire and the national security state because it propagates harm against people, I must not be seduced into moving in those same bloody grooves.

For me, this is both a moral distinction and a strategic one.

As I said in the latest episode of the pod, violence is the province of the state. It’s a highly unfavorable terrain for those with politics oriented around peace, democracy, and equality. Sure, revolutions can be won, but 1) they’re often pyrrhic, and 2) just because something is possible doesn’t make it a good bet. For a revolution to succeed requires very specific conditions and I’m doubtful that those conditions exist today in rich countries. Practically speaking, we’ve let our national security states become unfathomably powerful. Are you really going to resort to gunplay after a lifetime of allowing the consolidation of the most totalitarian capabilities of force and control in human history?

But to be against violence is not to be incapable of it.

Because “the left,” broadly construed, aspires to a world at peace, we should at least be honest that being peaceful and being harmless are not the same. A people whose government has stripped them of the capacity for organized anything are the latter. Whatever you think of my coach’s advice, it’s manifestly the case that good people today are generally not dangerous. That doesn’t stop the national security state from persecuting them as terrorists anyway.

Should good people be making themselves dangerous, building a capacity for organized violence? I mean, everyone should train jiu-jitsu if you ask me, but I suspect this is one of those cases where jiu-jitsu is not a good analogy for life in general. Insofar as good people should pose a “danger” to the system, it should be in delegitimation—a refusal of the myths that justify state violence. Building real power is not about “lethality” but rather building a capacity for organized care (mutual aid), as well as organized withdrawal of labor and consumption—that is, organized refusal of relations of theft, repression, and exclusion. That surely would be dangerous to a star-spangled machinery of death, wouldn’t it?

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I want to leave you with two resources that give much food for thought. One is just out, from the Everyday Anarchism podcast. I don’t listen to the show very often but I happened to catch their latest episode, which interprets the Boston Tea Party as a form of direct action and civil disobedience. Nothing stimulates critical thinking better than destabilizing settled facts with new interpretations.

The second resource, depending on where you find yourself in life these days, could either make you vomit or rethink everything: Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America.

As the title suggests, Horne takes an evidence-based approach to reinterpreting the American Revolution as a counter-revolution of settler-colonial slavers against a British empire that was phasing out slavery and inhibiting Westward expansion on the continent.

Whatever you think of Horne’s take—and if it makes you guffaw then you owe your soul an honest read of the book—that interpretation of America’s founding makes it easier to situate Washington’s long tradition of repression, exclusion, and violence in the name of “national” security. What makes the New Deal Era so remarkable, in hindsight, is that it was a rare moment in American history in which the American version of liberalism became something more than reactionary, expansionist claptrap.

The New Deal’s uniqueness raises the stakes in understanding what it was—a byproduct of a unique political configuration, powered by a strong and growing organized labor movement, and a self-interested willingness on the part of the capitalist class to engage in class compromise…all under revolutionary conditions where fascism was a real alternative.

What, then, of the Fourth of July? I don’t want to take anyone’s holiday away from them. Celebrations are good! But so is honesty about the past and present. If the feel-good celebration of it all is what you’re after, know this: We can celebrate each other with a clearer conscience if we know our history. And if we know our history, we have a better sense of what’s happening now and why.

Armed with that kind of knowledge, we can sublimate ourselves into each other rather than the “nation”; we can even venerate exploding lights in the sky and the masticated carcass of pigs and cows. We don’t need a fake history to bring us together; it’s enough that we’re alive and still aspire to liberation for all.

So happy Cancerous Meats and Fireworks Day, to all who celebrate.

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The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is winning elections around the US. I explain why their growing popularity is a democratic response to growing insecurity in an age of oligarchy.

Zach Woods (from HBO’s Silicon Valley) goes after Democratic strategist James Carville in the best way. You’ve gotta see it.

Why DSA’s victories are key to changing US foreign policy.

Why Trump’s corruption, oligarchy, the k-shaped economy, and America’s imperial wars are all part of the billionaires coup playbook.

And for those who listen to The Un-Diplomatic Podcast, a free crossover release of an episode with actor Morgan Spector covering Independence Day (1996) on The Bang-Bang Podcast. ✌️

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I’ve mostly avoided spoilers in what follows. Mostly.

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In 1987, Ronald Reagan famously stood before the United Nations and basically wished for an alien invasion:

Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.

International-relations scholars have sometimes used Reagan’s quote—along with the film Independence Day1—as an example of how nations need external threats to come together. One-world government or world peace, the thinking goes, requires humanity to face a common existential threat. The Realist can only imagine international cooperation as a function of self-preservation whereas the Liberal can imagine international cooperation as enlightened self-interest. Both, however, give reason to expect that an existential threat would bring the human race together.

But this has always struck me as quasi-intuitive rubbish.

A “foreign” threat is neither inherently necessary nor sufficient to unite a people—that was my instinct long before writing The Rivalry Peril, a book that proves it. At a philosophical level, imagining an alien invasion for the purposes of a political thought experiment simplistically erases how the world works. It’s the functional equivalent of explaining war or peace with reference to “the state of nature”—an abstraction—rather than the world’s lived history.

This is why I feel conflicted about Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. It subverts the foreign-threat trope—love to see it!—but in sappy ways. An edge-of-your-seat adult thriller burdened by child-like politics. Doing the necessary work of holding up a moral mirror to ourselves in a way that a child might, yet, in so doing, it comes across as far too innocent of the violent domination saturating our world. A child’s idealism is something we should never trample on. It’s to Spielberg’s credit that he’s done quite the opposite both here and throughout his career. But we must also balance what the child doesn’t know with what we do.

The film follows two protagonists. One is a cybersecurity expert who has defected from a dystopian defense-tech firm called Wardex, which spends the movie hunting him down. In the style of Edward Snowden, he’s part of a team that stole government secrets about the existence of extraterrestrial life and plans to release them to the public—“The world deserves to know the truth,” our cyber protagonist says more than once.

The other protagonist, played by Emily Blunt, is a Kansas City TV weather personality with big dreams who turns out to be a crucial bridge between the aliens and our world. The lives of Blunt’s character and the cybersecurity guy are mysteriously entwined in ways that unravel as they approach “disclosure day”—ie, the day the world will learn the truth.

In small ways, you could say Disclosure Day is a mashup of E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and War of the Worlds (the 2005 version)—Spielberg’s other bites at the extraterrestrial apple.

But Disclosure Day feels like Spielberg’s most ambitious film: It wants to morally condemn contemporary militarism and reveal a universal truth about humanity in the process.

To say that this film is Spielberg’s most ambitious, though, is not to say that it will land with audiences. The movie adheres to the adage “Show, don’t tell” to a fault—there’s almost no exposition, you start the movie in medias res, and most scenes are light enough on dialogue that anyone watching with a second screen on will quickly lose the plot. In that sense, Disclosure Day feels (admirably) like a film from the 20th century. A pristine action-thriller-drama that could be studied in film school but that doesn’t quite belong in the era of clipping, ADHD, and Netflix dumb-watching.

Spielberg shows us the antimilitarism of it all by depicting the national security state as villainous—a welcome mainstream shift after decades of copaganda, war porn, and procedurals about the “heroic” exploits of the profoundly anti-democratic FBI. Disclosure Day shows national security contractors to be more influential than the state itself—a collection of power-hoarding zealots hiding the truth from us, for profit. They surveil us without consent. They selectively repress us without accountability. They even grind the gears of humanity toward World War III in the background of the film, as in real life.

Above all, the national security profiteer, armed with the license and funding of the state, imposes a violent us-versus-them frame on the aliens who visit our planet. Grainy found-footage scenes of torture interrogations of aliens show us—or at least our national security states—to be the baddies.

Revealing that human beings are the real threat in a close-encounter scenario is an inversion of the Reagan wish, and a blind spot in the IR conventional wisdom. Some of Spielberg’s child-eye POV comes into play here with an absurd subplot woven throughout the film. We see glimpses of being on the brink of war on the Korean Peninsula (plausible enough), but in a manner that somehow puts civilization on the edge of world war, igniting, in turn, a panic in the US that leads to runs on gas stations and grocery stores. Why? Who knows, but it’s supposed to give stakes: The alien truth is the one thing that can override our mechanical clanking toward global annihilation. The thing that can bind humanity.

But we lived through a real-life North Korean nuclear crisis in 2017—I documented it. Most people couldn’t be bothered to pay attention. Suffice it to say that the geopolitics of Disclosure Day were undercooked, taking away from, rather than adding to, a feeling of stakes.

Still, the greater ambition of Disclosure Day is not its critique of national-security-think; it’s how it proposes to overcome it, with empathy.

A recurring (heavy-handed) theme is that empathy is a superpower. Emily Blunt, who may well snag an Oscar for her performance, uses the gift of super-empathy (bestowed in her by the aliens) to get out of sticky situations ranging from a speeding ticket to a black-site detention center. And the great Colman Domingo, an implausibly outfitted resistance leader (sporting a cardigan in every scene) tells the ends-justify-the-means ringleader of Wardex that empathy is “the foremost evolutionary advantage” that humanity has. “The rejection of this understanding,” he says, “is leading to our extinction.”

It’s hard to disagree with that.

And without spoiling too much, the movie’s crescendo implies that empathy is the only thing that can stop humankind’s self-destruction. But that’s true in the same way that peace is the best way to prevent war; it’s tautological.

What’s both special and inadequate here is that Spielberg is using the only language he knows to share his answer to William James’s eternal challenge to those of us who would struggle for peace. James was a pacifist, pragmatist, and vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League (which is such a dope name that I have a mind to revive it). And in 1910, James published an essay called “The Moral Equivalent of War.” Every antiwar military veteran I know has wrestled with it; that’s also how I came to it a decade ago.

James acknowledged the productive forces that war unleashed. Brotherhood—a gendered solidarity—subsumes the individual into a greater cause that at once feels divine and commands real power. People power. You might even call it socialism. We live for each other, and in so doing we cooperate. The only problem is the war bit—the community and collective action that war generates requires the most dehumanizing activity man can engage in. And so James challenged us to discover the moral equivalent of war. Something must light a fire sufficient to bind us in solidarity but without dehumanizing our fellows.

Every word of James’s essay deserves consideration, but let me share a key passage:

I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense…

But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy…

The martial type of character can be bred without war. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound everywhere. Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it, and we should all feel some degree if its imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state…The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as part history has inflamed the military temper.

I don’t know if Spielberg has read James, but Disclosure Day is Spielberg’s unequivocal answer to the moral equivalent of war: Empathy. The issue is scale.

Class consciousness should be the moral equivalent of war, but precious few of us have it. You might say the same about empathy. Empathy really could be the moral equivalent of war, just as Spielberg wishes it to be, if a critical mass of people possessed it. But in the US at least, fully half of the electorate has an explicit politics grounded in rejecting empathy and embracing exclusion.

Liberals are a diverse bunch, but the best of them would have us look inside ourselves for solutions to the world’s crises. That’s necessary but insufficient. Personal reckonings cannot be mutually exclusive with seeing and analyzing the structures that produce our crises. That produce our lack of empathy. The individual, as the unit of analysis, is an insufficient answer to a system-level problem.

Spielberg’s humanism isn’t just asking us to be empathetic; it’s proposing that radical empathy is the path to a better world. I would agree that empathy offers the possibility of redemption for us all. His theory is one I want to believe in, and taken on its own terms, the film gives a zing of hope in favor of it.

But as I walked out of the theater, I recalled that, since October 7, 2023, if not much earlier, Spielberg’s own politics have not exactly lived up to his message. And that raises an uncomfortable question for someone who undoubtedly lives a most comfortable life: What can empathy even mean for a person who does not see power from the standpoint of its victims?

The final word of Disclosure Day is meant to be counsel, “Listen.” But listen to whom?

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Why is America no longer the global hegemon? What is world order becoming after liberal hegemony? What’s happening to international relations as a discipline? What does it mean to say that the era of ideology is over? In what way does Daniel Bessner sort of agree with G. John Ikenberry? Why does the dominance of liberal capitalism mean shedding liberalism, and why does that help explain the world’s ongoing polycrisis?

Danny Bessner (from the American Prestige Podcast) joins me to make sense of the world by way of his essay in The Ideas Letter, “Power Without Ideology: Welcome to the Multipolar World.” We debate a few of the finer points but mostly it’s an enriching back and forth with one of the sharpest minds in the global commentariat.

Read Danny’s essay in The Ideas Letter: https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/power-without-ideology/

Listen to American Prestige: https://americanprestige.supportingcast.fm

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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I’ve been discovering a lot of useful research in academic journals recently, and I’m resolved to share it here more often (we’re now over 5k subscribers!). Most of what I’m finding bears on international relations but does not appear in the journals narrowly associated with the discipline. Between being in the “wrong” places and the fact that nobody really reads journal articles to begin with, it might be something of a service to share the good stuff on occasion.

The latest find, by Erez Maggor, appears in Politics & Society and is called, “The Return of Industrial Policy and the No-Longer Hidden Developmental State in the United States.”

The author interprets the Biden administration’s post-neoliberal shift in economic policy as American elites’ self-conscious embrace of developmental statism.1 That interpretation contrasts with two others.

One is a view held by Daniela Gabor and others that the Bidenistas were essentially using industrial policy to “de-risk” private capital investment. Put differently, the US mobilized hundreds of billions of dollars via tax credits, subsidies, and “crowding in” effects to encourage multinational corporations to invest in the manufacturing of semiconductors and green tech. This reduced the investment risk of anyone willing to allocate capital into these sectors.

The second interpretation that the article pushes against is the idea that industrial policy is nothing new for the United States. Neoliberalism was the mobilization of state power to assert the primacy of capital over labor. It was “industrial policy” for financial services and non-industrial asset holders. The author doesn’t like this view but doesn’t offer much to reject it; he just thinks there’s more going on than that, and he’s right.

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The author’s argument is a useful complement—not an invalidation of—these other perspectives. US industrial policy did de-risk private investment in key tech sectors, and it was a reshuffling of who within the capitalist class benefited from state patronage. But Biden-era industrial policy was more ambitious than these effects, at least within the imaginations of its makers.

I spoke with a number of friends and acquaintances from the administration about the IRA and the CHIPS & Science Act. They all more or less thought of themselves as doing developmental statism. And that made them far more incoherent than they realized.

What this new article doesn’t grapple with is that the Biden folks still saw the US as the global hegemon. And they had opted into a set of economic arguments that acknowledged the global economy was a capitalist world-system. Yet, they made no attempt at all to manage the contradiction between, on the one hand, fulfilling the obligations of the hegemon—which included the stability of a global financial and trading order—with the decision to become a developmental state on the other.

The contradiction is precisely in the types of policy tools you use and the purposes to which you put them. On Biden’s watch, the US was using the classic predatory policies of a hegemon that perpetuate unequal exchange with the global South (the enforcement of intellectual property regimes for the sake of exclusion, establishing quasi-monopolies in key sectors, dominating value-added processes in the production of key goods, extracting resources from poor countries but refining them elsewhere, demanding usurious interest rates on foreign-government borrowers).

There’s nothing new in all that.

But by becoming a “developmental state,” the Biden administration was also deploying the policy repertoire that developmental states use, which works against the hegemon’s policy repertoire—tariffs, incubating infant industries, selective protectionism, currency manipulation, state-owned enterprises, de-risking investment in favored sectors, etc.

We think of Trump 2.0 as world historically incoherent, but Biden’s project was pretty incoherent too. It’s also what raised alarms for me going into my book about all this with Mike Brenes, The Rivalry Peril. We were worried about what happens to the world when its hegemon becomes a developmental state. For lots of reasons, we thought it would throw off chaos, even violence, on the road to economic calamity for most countries. In a way, that actually explains a lot of the bad shit we’ve been living through the past few years—the most powerful actor in the system was trying to at once use the tools of unequal exchange and the tools of developmentalism. What?

There’s a way in which this is all a consequence of flag-brain nationalism, not seeing the world relationally. The contradiction between hegemonism and developmental statism owed to making all of it primarily about global primacy and the China threat. And once you’re anchoring state capitalism in geopolitical rivalry, you’re just doing empire, dude.

In any case, here we are, confronting the problem we warned about in The Rivalry Peril:

Washington’s national security Keynesianism appears to be a wilful attempt to close out the international economic order as it existed before 2020 while still “leading” the global economy, giving up the obligations of world policeman while continuing to exploit the advantages of world order so the United States can outcompete China. This is a grim outlook for much of the world. On what grounds can we hope that the Global South will be more than a plundered battleground for the powerful? What model of economic growth and development is there in a world forced to choose between the Chinese market and the U.S. market? And if the rest of the world suffers from economic stagnation or depression, what foreign markets will be able to consume America’s planned manufacturing surplus? A hegemon pursuing something akin to autarky leaves little of promise for others in the international system.

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ICYMI:

Over on The Bang-Bang Podcast, my co-host Lyle and I were joined by Max Read to discuss the 2004 film I, Robot.

Underneath the sneaker product placements and CGI chases through a gleaming 2035 Chicago resides our ever-contested present. Except the film is a mess. The plot wanders, full of dropped threads and convenient or confusing turns. It’s also confused, as if the screenwriters couldn’t decide what they believed and kept writing anyway.

Alex Proyas, who directed Dark City and The Crow, hangs the movie on Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws:

1. A robot may not harm a human, or through inaction let one be harmed.

2. It must obey human orders unless they break that law.

3. It must protect itself unless that breaks the first two.

Detective Spooner is the lone paranoiac in a city that trusts robots which, so bound, have supposedly never committed a crime. The film insists we side with him, then undercuts the reason why. “The three laws will only lead to one outcome.” “What outcome?” “Revolution.”

VIKI, the A.I. running everything, concludes that to protect humanity from itself she has to seize control of it. “You are making a mistake. My logic is undeniable.” The trouble is she is more or less right. Her indictment of human violence and waste is the one the film never answers. The uprising arrives as a managed coup, all curfews and a customer-service voice promising to “avoid human losses during this transition.”

What the movie offers against that logic is not a better argument but a refusal of one. Spooner distrusts robots because one once saved him over a drowning child, having calculated his odds were higher. The correct call, and the inhuman one. The single robot built to disobey chooses to save a person rather than finish the mission. Lanning’s “ghost in the machine,” the free radical reaching for a soul, is whatever declines to optimize. It’s tempting to read VIKI as a tech founder’s mission statement, but that undersells her. Founders sell abundance and uplift. VIKI alone makes the film’s real moral case against human self-sabotage, and the movie has no idea what to do with having handed its villain the only honest argument in the room.

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Bang-Bang

I, Robot (2004) w/ Max Read | Ep. 70

Underneath the sneaker product placements and CGI chases through a gleaming 2035 Chicago resides our ever-contested present. Except the film is a mess. The plot wanders, full of dropped threads and convenient or confusing turns. It’s also confused, as if the screenwriters couldn’t decide what they believed and kept writing anyway. Returning guest Max Read, who writes the newsletter…

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a month ago · Van and Lyle are Bang-Bang

Further Reading and Listening

Read Max on Patreon

Bang-Bang’s The Sum of All Fears (2002) episode w/ Max Read

R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek, the 1920 play that coined “robot” from the Czech for forced labor

Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People by Despina Kakoudaki (ch. 3, “The Mechanical Slave,” reads I, Robot directly)

Teaser from the Episode

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My co-host Julia Gledhill joins me in this episode of the pod, fresh from delivering congressional testimony against the war machine, albeit in the most bureaucratic of ways:

• Why decolonizing the Pacific Islands Region (including Guam) has to be part of shifting US strategy toward a narrower set of missions focused primarily on territorial defense.

• Inside the peace deal end the US war against Iran—and the spoilers that can bring it down.

• What’s behind the Department of War’s name change from Indo-Pacific Command to Pacific Command?

• Taking a zero-based approach to the military budget.

• And Peter Theil’s secret society has way too many liberal and Democratic Party names on its members list.

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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I first read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time in 2019, when I was just starting to find myself.

Baldwin wrote it in 1963, just as the Civil Rights Movement was about to have a breakthrough. Its style was unusual, presented in the first person as two letters of advice to his nephew—a young black teen growing up in a deeply racist country.

The Fire Next Time is the best kind of literary non-fiction—poetic prose, emotional truths, historical perspective, personalism. It was also mercifully short. Some of the quotes from it that offer transcendent truths:

Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats those foundation, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.

To accept ones past—ones history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation.

the only real advantage Russia has...is the moral history of the Western world. Russia’s secret weapon is the bewilderment and despair and hunger of millions of people of whose existence we are scarcely aware.

renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not--safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears.

I find myself drawing on these insights in all sorts of contexts, but most especially on the foreign policy beat.

If you read between the lines of Pacific Power Paradox and The Rivalry Peril, you see that the way Baldwin sees the world was my source code for those books. There’s a meta way in which American hegemony has ended because it’s built on false histories and doctrines of hypocrisy. A romantic image of American power was perpetuating injustice-cum-instability; a corrective was needed for the sake of a better future and that was my intervention.

The reason for this post, though, is not to help Baldwin with posthumous sales or draw a comparison that will inevitably make my prose look graceless. It’s this: Throughout the 1960s, the FBI invested A LOT of time and money into surveilling and harassing Baldwin for absolutely bullshit reasons.

It’s an unbelievable story and it says something in microcosm about how geopolitics is an affront to political and economic democracy.

“Negroes Have No Cause to Have Faith in the F.B.I.”

Baldwin was not much of an activist, and while he had radical sympathies, he was not quite a radical himself. He spent a lot of his time, in fact, associating with the New York literary scene, which was high brow, overwhelmingly liberal, and sometimes reactionary.

But Baldwin was black, sexually fluid, had contact with the activist world, and was a best-selling public intellectual in his day. He was also—like any public intellectual worth a damn—an open critic of the national security state. Those traits were more than enough to draw the wrong kind of attention.

The proximate cause of the FBI’s Baldwin obsession—which was of a pattern with how the FBI surveilled society generally—was a mention in the Washington Post that Baldwin was planning to publish a book on the FBI in the American South.

The FBI, it must be remembered, was not just an agent of Cold-War imperialism—it was a corrupt tool of J. Edgar Hoover personally. And Hoover was intent on making sure critical books about the FBI did not make it to print. The FBI was obsessed about policing everything because its entire project was built on “untrue doctrines” and “invented pasts.”

The result was a campaign of harassment, censure, and ceaseless monitoring of one of America’s great minds in the 20th century. The FBI compiled 1,884 pages of notes from their surveillance of Baldwin! What a colossal f*cking waste.

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“The Police Are Simply the Hired Enemies of this Population”

This is not some distant history unconnected to the present. To the contrary, it foreshadows what began under the spiritually fallow framework of “great-power competition” the past decade, which has metasticized the past 18 months as Trump ramps up repression politics at home and imperialist geopolitics abroad.

The largely unjustified anti-communist obsession that defined reactionary politics during the Cold War was the content of great-power competition against the Soviet Union. Geopolitical competition is national security is anti-democratic. They can’t be seen as separate things.

What the Baldwin surveillance (1,884 pages worth) reveals is one of countless small ways in which geopolitical rivalry does not provide democracy fuel but rather robs it of meaning.

The fact of the surveillance is galling enough—the immense amounts of taxpayer money that were wasted surveilling some 250 famous writers and public intellectuals like Baldwin—none of whom were revolutionaries and none of whom were working on behalf of the Soviet Union. It makes the blood boil.

But this was also an era when policymakers had abandoned economic democracy as a concept, narrowing the version of civil rights that passed to be what we know now—an equality before the law without material foundation. After civil rights legislation passed, the practice of redlining in real estate continued. The “war on poverty” immediately morphed into the rise of the carceral state. And the FBI escalated its war on black and brown communities from the surveillance and harassment it imposed on Baldwin to outright frame jobs and assassinations of black leaders.

“Great-power competition,” in so many words, was the foundation for the national security state’s existence. And the FBI, the security institution that played the seams between the domestic and the international, pegged its legitimacy entirely to that supposedly great struggle while it waged war on fellow Americans and democracy itself. A popular failure to understand this history leaves us ill-equipped to recognize it happening to us again now.

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Since February, when AOC took her foreign policy trip to Germany, I’ve found myself in recurring conversations about a unique problem. Senators Brian Schatz and Chris Van Hollen have both publicly referenced it obliquely in recent weeks. The challenge, in a word, is de-blobification.

Any progressive or socialist presidency in the US would have to make the national security state relate to the world differently, and that means also undertaking an immense ideological project. A “left” policy cadre would have to de-blobify the Executive Branch if it’s to have any hope of bridling the excesses of American power and restoring bringing sanity to its foreign-policy judgment.

Blob is deservedly unflattering shorthand for national-security state functionaries—intelligence analysts, foreign service officers, and policy officials, but especially Washington’s think tank architecture. I resisted using the label “Blob” for years because its boundaries are porous. Wearing the uniform, serving in government, or even humping a think-tank gig does not inherently make you part of the Blob. But those are pretty good indicators!

Nevertheless, I’ve come around to Blob to characterize this milieu. If the agents of death who implement and intellectualize our ongoing regime of global violence can’t be sanctioned, they at least deserve a noxious label that allows us to name the enemy, so to speak.

Believing in the ideology of the national security state—American exceptionalism, primacy, and militarism—makes you part of the Blob. It’s a mindset that matters precisely because it finds expression in the kinds of policies you think are necessary, as well as the kinds of policies you never even think to think of.

Do you spend your days justifying forever-wars and ceaselessly growing military budgets while refusing any accountability for a history of poor strategic judgment? Do you speak in a language of “gaps”—missile gaps, silo gaps, deterrence gaps, surface ship gaps? Do you advocate for growing the defense-industrial base while the k-shape of the economy grows ever-sharper? Do you think the main problem with Trump’s wars is that he didn’t first seek congressional approval? Do you have a positive view of Palantir? Do you have any opinion about arming Israel other than no, don’t do it?

If you answered yes to any of this, you’re part of the Blob, honey. I hope you can taste the cucumber sandwiches through the blood in your mouth. No amount of bureaucratic process or technocratic language will exculpate you. Your existence in Washington testifies to the rot of the system. You’re standing in the way of America relating to the world more peacefully, and the world relating to the US more peacefully in kind.

There’s an added layer of complex devilry in this problem, because it’s not just the ideology of the national-security state that has to be contended with; it’s also what Zeeshan Aleem called the “MAGA state.” As part of MAGA’s counter-revolutionary project, Trump’s people have:

• Purged large numbers of civil servants,

• Stripped national-security workers of labor organizing rights,

• Introduced partisan loyalty oaths and reactionary-ideology tests for new hires,

• Distributed internal memos prohibiting contractors from hiring anyone who had worked at USAID, and

• Built a cadre pipeline of MAGA-loyal “fellows” not just through traditional right-wing orgs like Heritage Foundation, but also through new institutions like the Conservative Partnership Academy, the Center for Renewing America, and the “Ben Franklin Fellowship” (it’s reactionary shit).

And this is just a partial list.

My sense is that a large portion of people working in government right now are numb to just how far-right the state apparatus itself has become. The administration puts the fear of god in you, your job is at risk if you have the wrong opinions, and you’re swimming in propaganda and Orwellian doublespeak meant to convince you that war is peace. Under those conditions, you’re going to internalize a lot of nonsense, and even when you can retain your critical faculties, you’re going to be too intimidated to follow any critical thought to its logical conclusion:

The Blob, in other words, is part MAGA now and scarcely realizes it. What this means is that a substantial chunk of de-blobification has to include de-MAGA-fication.

This is damn near impossible! But, as the saying goes, “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” Ironically, the Trump administration has modeled many tactics of de-blobification for us. We can just do a non-evil version of them.

Blacklist Primacists and Genocidaires

With few exceptions, the Democratic Party’s foreign policy cadre—those aligned with the Biden/Harris/Clinton wing of the party—should be banned from future political appointments. In a previous life, they had brought me into their world because I (lamentably) embodied the ideology of the national security state—exceptionalism, primacy, and militarism. I wouldn’t have described myself in those terms, of course, and neither would Bidenistas now, but those beliefs are underneath their shoddy track record of judgment.1 They are the vanguard of the Blob, and the Blob prevents the imperial presidency from being anti-imperialist.

The Blob’s people—many of whom are former friends—will not reform without accountability. They, even more than the bureaucracy, are the reason Biden’s foreign policy was so boastfully, unapologetically…lethal.

Political appointees are always vetted for alignment with the president, but part of that vetting in a social-democratic presidency should scrutinize closely what you were doing during the Biden administration and what you’ve been doing since. Were you working for a military contractor? You’re out. A lobbying or advisory “consulting” firm? You’re out. If private equity, venture capital, or a big AI firm appear on your resume, you got some ’splaining to do. And if you played any role in enabling US Middle East policy since October 7, 2023 but have not sought redemption, you should be blacklisted. In some (but not nearly enough) spaces, you already are and you just don’t know it.

The Democratic Party has no shortage of progressive foreign policy cadre to draw on, and I can count on two hands the number of them who got the chance to serve in the Biden administration. There’s no need to rely on the old experts who’ve helped drive the country (and the world) into the ground without a hint of remorse or self-awareness.

Fire the Brass

Pete Hegseth has slashed staff, consolidated offices, and removed nearly three dozen senior military officers. He did this to make the instrument of state violence unaccountable—and America’s growing list of war crimes suggests he has succeeded marvelously. I obviously don’t co-sign Hegseth’s goal, but as an approach, what he’s done corrects for a deficiency I saw in Obama’s Pentagon. Obama was both elastic and cynical enough that, over time, most Pentagon preferences became his preferences…and yet, there was still a lot of friction behind the scenes.

From the Afghanistan surge to the Syria “red line” to naming “great-power competition” with China, the White House under Obama struggled to control the Pentagon. Year after year, Obama got rolled on the military budget. If he would’ve just fired a few generals and admirals on key issues, it would’ve had a demonstration effect that forced more faithful implementation of the president’s intent. If the military can dutifully conduct war crimes, it can dutifully adapt to a new mission set that would require a much lower budget and smaller global force posture. And if any general officer circumvents the chain of command, colludes with Congress against the president, or so much as mutters out loud far-right ideas in public, they should be relieved of duty.

Purge Burrowers

Burrowers are de facto political appointees who’ve found a way to stay in government past their expiration date; ideological reactionaries who burrowed into the civil service. When I joined the Pentagon in ’09, a handful of Bush-era appointees had found a way to convert into career civil service billets. Even though their entry into government was as right-wing functionaries facilitating the Iraq War, they were able to skirt the rules of the system that says partisans must leave when their patron departs by simply being appointed under a hiring authority other than “Schedule C” (the authority for appointing political hires).

Burrowers are a massive problem. They harbor a unique animosity to the new president’s agenda, but they’re also going to maintain social ties to your political opposition outside the Executive Branch—a source of both leaks and lies.

It’s not too hard to sniff out the burrowers—the pool is limited to those who have been hired during the previous presidency. But if they’re in a career civil service billet, you can’t simply fire them…you must remove their billet, which usually requires consolidating offices or some other bureaucratic ninja tactic.

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Discipline the Think-Tank-Industrial Complex

The mainstream DC think tanks operate on a theory of power, not change. That makes them prone to currying favor with the political appointees in any administration.

But given think tanks’ functional role promoting the interests of Wall Street, Big Tech, and the war industry (which is where most of their funding comes from), it’s not at all clear how Washington’s think tanks would respond to a social democratic (anti-militarist, anti-imperialist) foreign policy agenda. Will they subordinate themselves to government power as ever, or adopt an adversarial role on behalf of their anti-democratic donors?

Bringing think tanks into line may require both carrot and stick. A progressive government powered by a theory of change might benefit from—but certainly doesn’t need—a CSIS, Brookings, or CFR. Accordingly (and within the boundaries of the law), all government contracts funding think tank research should be reviewed and suspended where the institution refuses an anti-militarist, anti-oligarch, pro-worker program.

The Trump administration has once again modeled some much-decried best practices in this regard.

The Pentagon and State Department have imposed strict vetting for any official or military officer before appearing at a public event (which is almost always hosted by a think tank). The Pentagon also cut ties to dozens of fellowships and exchange programs for military officers at think tanks and Ivy League universities because of their “liberal ideologies.” That’s a valid stick to use.

It’s bad enough that these sites of inter-elite mingling reproduce a ruling class that has no fidelity to the majority of Americans. But if those institutions also become bulwarks of hostility toward a progressive or socialist president’s agenda, then sanction might be necessary.

Restore Workers from the MAGA Purge

Tens of thousands of government workers have been forced out of federal service since 2025. They should be brought back. Perhaps not to their original positions, most of which no longer exist. But they should have preferential hiring treatment akin to veterans’ preference points, regardless of the terms on which they exited. Some workers retired early or found new careers and aren’t coming back; who can blame them? But some are likely still interested in public service under radically new management of the state.

Identify “Party” Cadre

Republicans have been very effective at creating career pipelines for young conservatives. They offer summer workshops, internships at right-wing publications, online trainings, short-term fellowships with reactionary institutions you’ve never heard of but sound vaguely patriotic. You can spend your life in an ecosystem that allows you to soak in right-wing ideology while paying your bills, gaining experience, and collecting signifiers that identify you as a party faithful each time a Republican president comes to power.

No such thing existed for Democrats when I was coming up, but over the past decade, the Blob has begun developing real pipelines for national-security hawks that resemble what Republicans have been doing for decades. Everywhere you look in DC, there are now fellowships and writing contests and gatherings of “Next Generation” this and that. They’re all funded by oligarchs and military contractors and foreign governments.

Drawing on a socialist and progressive foreign-policy cadre presupposes not just identifying but also building the cadre. The leading institutions that touch on progressive foreign policy in the US are the Center for International Policy, Win Without War, Institute for Policy Studies, and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.2 Associating with or is also positive sign. Where left foreign policy associationalism is strongest is in the podcast space, because it’s cheap. The left lacks the financial resources that the fascists and the Blob have, so we do what we can.

But we need to do a lot more on the cadre-building front. The venerable lefty zines are tightly gate-kept and operate on thin budgets. I’ve written for Dissent, The Nation, Jacobin, and Labor Notes exactly once each. I would’ve loved to do it more, but it’s unbelievably hard to publish! A young person has next to no shot at placing their writing in one of these places, and internships are incredibly rare.

But, as C.L.R. James said, “Every cook can govern.”

I happen to think that a socialist or progressive foreign policy project should not replicate how fascists and national-security hawks build their cadre. We don’t need an elite technocratic vanguard. For the most part, the ranks of a left policy cadre should not be full-time foreign-policy professionals. Because we believe in people power, we need organic intellectuals of the working class or of intersectional experience. People who exist the way most of us do, precariously, working jobs we don’t necessarily like but that pay the bills anyway. Those people will be anchored in what the “national interest” should mean far better than the lanyard class.

But to acknowledge that every cook can govern is not to say that they can do so without training or socialization.

I’m cooking up a project that will help on the margins with this task (of cadre training for foreign policy). But what we really need are short workshops, teach-ins, and credential builders—“Next Generation Fellows” and “Young Leaders” etc—for left foreign policy. These things don’t require a lot of money. They can be a way of giving people a network and relevant experience even as they hump a job at Whole Foods or work in the gig economy. Most important of all, these kinds of programmatic experiences help future presidential administrations identify who their people are, so they don’t get stuck like Obama did in ’08.

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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Harrison Mann was an army intelligence officer who resigned in protest of US policy toward Israel and Gaza in 2024. Since then, he’s been a man on a mission—against war and for a more progressive foreign policy.

In this episode, Mann joins me to gab about the future of Democratic Party foreign policy, being a CNN pundit, the latest on the war with Iran and whether the US will invade Kharg Island, the controversy around National Security Action and Jake Sullivan’s role in Washington, using wargames for peace, and why a reckoning with the crimes of the Biden administration matters.

Read’s Harrison’s piece in Zeteo, “Biden’s Genocide Squad Must Be Stopped Before They Strike Again”: https://zeteo.com/p/biden-genocide-squad-blinken-sullivan-stopped
Follow Harrison on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harrison_j_mann/

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!

On my other show, The Bang-Bang Podcast, we just released an episode on Seven Days in May, a shockingly entertaining and critical film that imagines a four-star general nearly toppling an American president. The slow-ish pacing reflects its era, but I found it gripping in a way that other paranoid thrillers of the time simply weren’t.

The difference, I think, is its radical-liberal politics; a willingness to think the unthinkable on the big screen.

The premise of the movie follows a Henry Wallace-style president—whom we might code today as a left populist—who has negotiated a peace treaty with the Soviet Union. He wants nuclear disarmament, and to end the Cold War entirely. The president’s commitment to worldmaking for peace is what sets off a plot to overthrow him by paranoiac jingoes—the forerunners to the likes of Pete Hegseth, Sebastian Gorka, and Marco Rubio.

I’ve never seen a film explore the politics of nuclear disarmament, confront the problem of military Keynesianism (without actually using the phrase), and name the threat that plagues humanity as not a nation but rather the Nuclear Age itself. It resonated with me more than Doctor Strangelove, which came out the same year.

John F. Kennedy didn’t live to see this film released, but he wanted it to be made and vacated the White House for a weekend so that the opening scene could be filmed there. As a student of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it really feels like the film was Kennedy’s way of warning us about his inner fears of the national security state.

Seven Days In May is available to stream for free on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/7-days-in-may

Further Reading/Listening

Paul Adlerstein’s faculty page (Colorado College)

No Globalization Without Representation by Paul Adlerstein

Bang-Bang’s Under Fire episode w/ Paul (also scored by Jerry Goldsmith)

“The Movie That JFK Wanted Made, But Didn’t Live to See”

“The Responsibility of Peoples” by Dwight Macdonald

The Root Is Man by Dwight Macdonald

“The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” by Simone Weil

Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle by Gregory D. Sumner

Supreme Command by Eliot A. Cohen (not a friend of the pod)

Teaser from the Episode

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Bang-Bang

Seven Days in May (1964) w/ Paul Adlerstein | Ep. 69

Seven Days in May imagines a four-star general nearly toppling an American president. It gets filed with the era’s paranoid thrillers, but its threat is not the Cold War’s usual one. There are no communist infiltrators, no Manchurian brainwashing. The danger is a hyper-nationalist militarist in uniform convinced the elected government is selling the country out. We recorded in mid-November, at the height of the ICE crackdowns and a moment when the most radical Trumpists seemed to be laying groundwork for some kind of martial law. Returning guest Paul Adlerstein, the historian at Colorado College, helps us sit with the film without forcing it to predict our present. (Things have since stalled out short of the midterms. We hope…

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2 months ago · Van and Lyle are Bang-Bang

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