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.

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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

Check Out The Episode!

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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6 days ago · Van and Lyle are Bang-Bang

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The government is now going after regular people who oppose data centers and are calling it the policing of “anti-tech extremist violence.” Guess who benefits from that?

Congress is pursuing an anti-China conspiracy theory about data center opposition in the US. It’s as absurd as it sounds, but with real consequences that Mike Brenes and I warned about in The Rivalry Peril.

Bernie Sanders is in the New York Times with a new proposal to seize the means of A.I. production, sort of.

New Zealand is allowing itself to fall into a militarist trap of its own making—what’s at stake in the debate about New Zealand military spending and its anti-nuclear stance.

Pete Hegseth’s speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue confirms one thing: The US is still pursuing global primacy, only under conditions where it’s neither possible nor justified…and that means violence.

What makes opposition to A.I. data centers a strategically useful site for both people-power struggles and state repression.

And the U.S. has illegally killed more than 200 people in over 60 strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific—that’s what the Monroe Doctrine looks like.

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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As Mark Twain wrote:

Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Visualizing data in the form of charts and graphs is a language. And language requires study.

But just as anyone with two fists (wrongly) thinks they can fight, so too anyone with two eyes seems to think they can read the language of data viz. Maybe it’s just my timelines, but charts and graphs seem to go viral far more often across all social media than any other type of content. In a low-literacy world, that’s perilous.

Take this chart, shared among Finance Bros this week to celebrate the glories of capitalism:

When they look at this chart (which one of them made), they see proof that capitalism since the 1960s has reduced the number of low-income people and increased the number of high-income people. It’s easy enough to see how a money-chaser could come up with this interpretation while scrolling on a toilet, but it’s wrong on multiple levels.

First, these categories are arbitrary. That matters because not only do these categories not represent class divisions; there is also no universe where a guy who makes $110k/year and a guy who makes $110 million/year should be in the same category.

Second, the chart does not account for cost of living, ie, inflation based on the Consumer Price Index.

Third, the measure for “total money income” in their data set excludes capital gains and inheritance. Seems important!

Fourth, the data used to populate the chart measures income (flows), not wealth (stock). Inequalities of both are a problem, but accumulated stocks of wealth are the basis of oligarchy—the conversion of wealth into political power. That is the main anti-capitalist line of critique the Finance Bros are trying to push against.

Finally, the top category in the chart excludes/erases how extreme even income inequality has become. You would never know by looking at this chart that less than 1% of households account for 22% of national income (or more than 1/3 of wealth). And the top 1% of income earners earn more than 6x the threshold for the top category in this chart.

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Add all this up, and the chart is a dumb-guy bullet fired from the wrong side in a class war. It’s a piece of sophistry. And we can see it as such because it distracted from two other charts that were circulating that same day.

The first showed that loan delinquencies of all types are currently up to levels not seen since the Global Financial Crisis:

The second showed that workers are now taking home the smallest percentage of America’s economic output since 1947 (when records began).

It’s more than coincidence, then, that corporate profits are now also at the highest point since 1950:

There’s a lesson in all this, and I don’t just mean that people use statistics to lie.

In one of Antonio Gramsci’s lesser-known works, he made an epistemological claim that I used to have a lot of trouble with. He said, in effect, that knowledge about power and society comes from having a partisan stance, by which he meant that the process of making analytical claims requires the analyst having a position or a stake in it (especially with reference to the balance of forces between capital and labor). If you’re like me, you were almost certainly taught the opposite of this in your rational-liberal-positivist PhD training. But the thing is, if you don’t know yourself in the way that Gramsci suggests—as a political animal—you can’t actually know anything meaningful about politics.

After puzzling over this for a long time, what this has come to mean for me is that, if you think of yourself on the side of “the good,” you must see power from the standpoint of its victims. If that’s not what orients your analysis, then you may well be a fool for someone else’s agenda.

In visualizing the economy, I might translate Gramsci’s insight this way: If you’re talking about the economy but not about its k-shape, unemployment, asset inflation, cost of living, or debt and bankruptcies, you’re distracting from the immiseration associated with the real economy. That was a fatal error in the Biden/Kamala campaign of 2024. Who next shall make that mistake?

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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But in the years since I arrived, life here has gotten measurably harder for the average Kiwi.

Wealth inequality is off the charts. Youth unemployment is growing. Rents cost more than mortgages. Students are struggling to find work after graduation. Community healthcare infrastructure is under strain and underfunded. And the price of food and fuel is worse than when I was in Hawai’i—the most expensive place I’ve ever lived.

That’s why people here are stunned—and increasingly irate—that the current government keeps making decisions that drive the “national economy” into the ground. If you’re a functioning democracy, it’s irrational to impose austerity on your people, raise interest rates on homeowners, cut government jobs, defund public research, sell off public assets, and invite foreign companies to poach your natural resources while asking for little of the financial upside from extraction.

Of course, if you’re an aspiring oligarchy, all those policies make perfect sense.

But the “national economy” is an illusion if what we mean is something that all Kiwis share in. New Zealand has a rentier economy. Most of the country’s wealth is trapped in home values and services around real estate—an asset already too expensive for anyone under 40 years old to afford.

The landlord class is not just a reality of life here; it’s the class on whose behalf both major parties seem to govern (National Party far more shamelessly so than Labour).1 The country’s wealth holders maintain their position not through investment in production but by 1) extracting rents from the assets they hold, 2) asset inflation, and 3) state support won via well-funded lobbying groups. Their class position is immune to youth unemployment, declines in productivity, or changes in GDP—all traditional measures of the health of a “national economy.”

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And so New Zealand, like most rich countries, really has at least two economies. Which one you exist within defines how you experience life. And the easiest predictor of which one you’re in is whether you own property.

The New Zealand story is part of the global story. I’ve written (and spoken) about this several times now, but the way surpluses accumulate in today’s version of capitalism (through rents, speculation, asset inflation, and consumer debt) promises certain nightmares worsening in the coming years. Social cohesion will collapse. The ranks of the “permanent underclass” will swell to include people you know (and maybe you and me). The center-right will become more fascistic in defense of the imperatives of capital accumulation. And far-right parties will gain strength as centre-left ones refuse radical solutions to radical problems.

These are the politics associated with a k-shaped economy.

In the US, oligarchy—which takes a K-shape—needs the permanent war economy. It’s also becoming true for China as inequality grows. But in smaller countries, a rentier economy has historically been more essential than military spending.2

That’s the linkage I want to make: Analysts almost never account for the fact that rentier economies in the global North (which includes New Zealand) are corollaries to America’s permanent war economy. Both are perversities that heighten inequalities domestically and globally. But they also co-constitute one another as part of the worldmaking of transnational oligarchy. The surpluses derived from rents and asset inflation also finance America’s war machine (with foreign debt purchases); they comprise a capitalist world-system.

It’s important to see these connections because they illuminate how struggles for a better world can run into a brick wall. In 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of poverty, racism, and militarism as the “Three Evils of Society.” We’re still battling those same demons today, but in mutated form.

Our three great challenges at a global level are America’s permanent war economy, imperialist methods in foreign policy, and oligarchic concentrations of wealth. To fight one of those is to fight all three. The lie is believing that you can win a fight for progress on only one of these fronts to the exclusion of the others.

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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Antiwar comedy kills!

In this hilarious episode of the pod, I explore the challenges of political or “charged” comedy in a country always at war. I’m joined by Orli Matlow (host of War is Stupid: An Antiwar Podcast About War) and William Hartung (co-author of the Trillion-Dollar War Machine). Both are comedians who make jokes against genocide and nuclear war; both are also part of the “progressive foreign policy” scene in New York.

Subscribe to the War is Stupid Podcast

Subscribe to Bill’s Newsletter, Disarming Humorist

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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This has triggered me, in a productive way:

Hunter was responding to my recent piece on how the Democratic Party should/could end up viewing China in the coming years. I started writing a response to his comment because he’s raising a good question, but it turned into a full-blown argument, so I’ve converted it into a post. Here goes.

Yes, the South China Sea (SCS) is the hard test for Chinese “assertiveness.” No, China would not view war as a success. Unlike most aspects of Chinese foreign policy, the SCS issue involves acts of Chinese coercion, land reclamation, and unilateral attempts to police what amounts to a knotty six-party territorial dispute. The way China relates to the SCS is impossible to square with China’s idealistic rhetoric about international order and harmony of nations and such. Given all that, Hunter is not wrong to ask “How can your theory of China account for Chinese militarization of the SCS?”

Relational Analysis Requires Proportionality

First, we must keep proportionality in mind. When I started working this issue back in 2012, I failed to situate China in a relational context. Consequently, I fell prey to crude and very hawkish thinking, reflecting poor analysis, like discounting the simple fact that China is not the only party engaged in unilateral action, including land reclamation, in the SCS.

More importantly, evidence of Chinese assertiveness in the SCS consists entirely of non-war, noncombat, and technically nonviolent actions, and yet it’s common for foreign-policy nerds to assume that China’s daring us to launch World War 3 (which is absurd). So we should reflect on how the pundit class has normalized coding restraint as aggression (China is being aggressive, but when that aggression is non-violent it’s also very literally restraint…imagine militaries around the world applying these standards to the US).

Inequalities at the Root

Domestic imbalances are at the root of Chinese assertiveness in the SCS. I covered this in The Rivalry Peril with Mike Brenes. Domestic imbalances—which are bound up with US domestic imbalances—are the source of inter-imperial rivalry. Accordingly, inter-imperial rivalry is underneath most “grey zone” activity (a neologism that I hate because it scandalizes zero-sum actions that are inherent to geopolitical rivalry…for example, any student of inter-Korean rivalry over the decades recognizes what’s been happening in the SCS…but nobody talks about Korean “grey zones” except for the most deranged hawks).

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Territorialist Logic in Response to a Crisis of Accumulation

There are added pressures driving China toward an aggressive posture in the SCS that are part of my root-cause theory of insecurity.1 I find the conventional ways of viewing the SCS—through a lens of either clashing nationalisms, the banal hypocrisies of international law, or confirmation bias that China is bad—as incurious and analytically shallow. I didn’t quite put it this way in The Rivalry Peril, but I’ve come to see the growth of friction around SCS disputes as the early reassertion of territorialist over capitalist logic that Giovanni Arrighi wrote about decades ago.

Viewing the SCS in isolation makes it impossible to see this, but heightened friction in the SCS really nests within a global trend associated with the long process of hegemonic decline. It’s useful, then, to think of the SCS an early sign of the proliferation of imperialist statecraft I’ve been writing and speaking about. And that trend is itself the product of domestic imbalances (which are part of the crisis of capitalism in our current conjuncture).

Geopolitical Brain Rot

Finally, from a maritime strategy perspective, China needs to expand into the SCS to counter US encirclement. I don’t think China should be expanding in the SCS, and I don’t think the US should be encircling China in the first place. But this is how militaries think. It’s also why the US should (but probably won’t) demilitarize and decolonize its presence in the Pacific Islands—militarization attracts the zero-sum geopolitical logic that reduces the security of the region.

To put it differently, the SCS is less secure because of Chinese actions, but Chinese actions are partly a geopolitical response to its strategic encirclement. This is one of the reasons that reducing US force presence in the region is strategically important.

I suppose I should add one last bit. A scenario is possible that, from the US perspective, would be nightmarish: That China attempts to regulate control of the South China Sea via some procedure more sophisticated than Iran’s enclosure of the Strait of Hormuz. I don’t think that will happen! But it could. Enclosures are entirely consistent with the spread of imperialist geopolitics; that’s literally what it means to assert power through territorial vice capitalist logic. But the US is simply not in a position to prevent that situation by force. This is one of the real constraints that multipolarity imposes.

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On the surface, Trump’s recent summit with Xi Jinping was inconsequential. But between Trump’s embrace of Xi’s Thucydides’ Trap rhetoric, Xi openly speaking of American decline, and Trump’s suspension of arms sales to Taiwan, the “China question” in US foreign policy suddenly became unsettled in a way that it has not been for at least a decade.

That’s a good thing! We’ve been on an apocalyptic trajectory. But power hates uncertainty, and so do its sycophants.

Given that all things China are very much in flux, I thought this might be a good time to outline the shape of the Democratic Party on China. Not the predictable foreign policy hawks who hocked “great-power competition” for Biden. I also don’t mean the shameless members of Congress who tried—and failed—to scaremonger their way to a Great Society. I mean the parts of the Democratic Party in touch with the pro-peace, antimilitarist base. Those aligned with the surging left populists taking on the oligarchs.

The Rivalry Peril is probably the single most coherent statement of what the populist wing of the Democratic Party thinks/has said about China. And as the progressive wing challenges its own party leadership in an inevitably hostile takeover, the arguments Mike Brenes and I make in that book will probably end up in greater circulation. Some of them already are.

But interest groups and ideologues invested in the status quo will not concede to change without a fight. In fact, I had an experience in Washington during the final year of Biden’s presidency that I’m sharing below because it illuminates the contentious politics around the China question.

I had stopped through DC during a cross-country tour for a different book and ended up speaking at a private dinner of Beltway progressives about China policy at the Tabard Inn. I was there to propose what a good US China policy would look like—some combination of 1) what would reflect the best analysis and 2) what would be responsive to political realities. I tabled how I saw things, and made the case that you can’t separate China from what was to be done in foreign policy generally—China policy should be a synecdoche for how America relates to the world, not an autonomous province in a foreign-policy kingdom.

I was mostly among friends, people with some interest in laying claim to a “progressive” position on China.1 We were under Chatham House rules, so no names, but after some initial friendly banter and good vibes, the discussion incited a lot of disagreement.

So here’s the gist of what I laid out on foreign policy and China, and the debate that ensued.

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This week I delivered a public lecture at the New Zealand Fabian Society. It was a packed house, and the folks who turned up had a range of really engaged questions, comments, and provocations. They were more amenable to my point of view than I expected.

In “Imperial End Times,” I present my theory of (nearly) everything, explaining how global war-making, far-right politics, the dehumanization of our neighbors, and domestic inequality knit together as a single story.

The lecture was live-streamed, which you can still watch here, but the cameraman accidentally foregrounded the back of some guy’s head in the audience and it made the video’s resolution quite fuzzy. But the audio is terrific quality, and I’ve released that as a special episode of the pod:

For the readers, I’ve also got a transcript below (assuming you support the newsletter). Inside you’ll find my breakdown of, well, a lot:

• What multipolarity, hegemony, and primacy are—and how they relate.

• Why US hegemonic decline is happening.

• What imperialist foreign policy is, and how we can know it when we see it.

• Why imperialist geopolitics is proliferating, and what makes Sino-US rivalry an inter-imperial rivalry.

• Why we are in an age of primitive accumulation, and why the crisis of capitalism is fundamentally a political crisis.

• Why imperialist foreign policy is even worse than imperial-ism and imperial order.

• What “repressive capital” is, and its function in consolidating oligarchy as the corollary of permanent war.

• And what we can do to fight back.

Read more

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We can’t afford blindness to the world-historical forces transforming the foundations of our reality.

Here’s my terrifying gist of the big picture: The oligarchic form of capitalism that dominates today (financialized, rentier-based, asset-inflating at the top, debt-fueled at the bottom) doesn’t need a mass workforce.1 What looks like the “middle class” hollowing out, shrinking, is the working majority becoming surplus labor. Especially white-collar workers.2

The truly scary bit is that surplus labor exists to be controlled through surveillance, repression, incarceration, and erasure. A state that perceives its interests as perpetuating oligarchy perceives human beings that are unnecessary to processes of capital accumulation as objects of threat projection; a problem to be managed. Thus, oligarchy needs a vast repressive security state to control (and eradicate) surplus labor. Where we end up, at best, is something worse than the dystopia of Demolition Man: 90% of us become heavily policed subaltern “Scraps” eating rat sandwiches while the remaining ten-percent live as sleek, tech-saturated eunuchs under authoritarianism.

This is tough medicine to swallow.

I grew up taking for granted that everyone should have access to quality public education; that the state existed partly to regulate safety conditions for workers and consumers; that free speech was an inalienable right; and that, if you were too poor, too sick, or too old to secure yourself, the welfare state should provide.

But what I’ve only recently realized is that these markers of an advanced society were contingent byproducts of labor-capital relations within a particular form of economic production that has been eroding since the 1970s.

Industrial capitalism made labor power possible, not just because workers could leverage their position at the point of production; the state form itself needed healthy, competent masses. Fordist manufacturing, for example, couldn’t function if nobody could read an instruction manual or if everyone was dying from the plague. The “New Deal Order” was a class compromise between capital and labor to regulate safety in the workplace; to offload the basic education of workers to the state; to pacify the masses with the assurance that a lifetime of wage work could one day end while they still lived.

That entire situation is gone, not just replaced by neoliberalism, but now by post-neoliberalism, which is much worse. There are consequences to living in an oligarchic system, even one with elections. If oligarchs think they don’t need us, then we’re surplus. In a democracy, the state would mobilize to make us secure. In an oligarchy, the state would mobilize to manage or “neutralize” dissenters, which is what the US counter-terrorism strategy effectively declares.

The fact that oligarchy needs the permanent war economy underlies the spread of imperialist geopolitics around the world, but there is a domestic corollary to imperialist worldmaking, which is the expansion of domestic repression at home.

We all know that AI is a growing source of unemployment, both because technological increases in productivity justify reducing labor costs for firms and because firms struggling toward profit are using AI as an excuse to cut labor costs regardless of productivity implications.

But the unemployment side of the AI discourse is often in its own bubble apart from the securitization side of AI as an anti-liberatory technology. AI is expanding the surplus labor population at the same time that it’s making the policing and repression of surplus populations more efficient. Silicon Valley bros are not wrong to believe the emergent mode of capitalism is producing a “permanent underclass.” But they are the key agents accelerating that problem while positioning themselves as the solution for managing it. You might call it a final solution. (too heavy handed)

Every day we see more signs of what it looks like for the ruling class to wield state power while viewing its fellow citizens as a surplus population whose labor the economy doesn’t need and whose consent is not required to function: it’s militarism against democracy, it’s dehumanization, it’s the commodification of repression, and it’s the enclosure of both the commons and community spaces. In short, it’s the persistence of capital accumulation but increasingly through primitive, pre-industrial means.

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After speaking on the pod about a new paper co-authored by Thomas Piketty, a couple listeners asked for me to share it. It’s called “Human Capital, Unequal Opportunities and Productivity Convergence: A Global Historical Perspective, 1800-2100,” and it presents some data supporting the grim narrative I’m putting forward here:

Over the 1800-2025 period, countries with higher public expenditure also have higher productivity growth. When public expenditure rises by 1% of GDP (e.g. from 10% to 11% of GDP), annual productivity growth increases by about 0.05% (e.g. from 1% to 1.05% per year). The effect is driven by human & social capital expenditure, including basic public services (justice, police, administration, roads, etc.), public human capital expenditure (education, health), and other human & social capital expenditure (research, culture, community, environment, etc.). It also holds after the inclusion of country fixed effects, capital-output ratio and region x period fixed effects (8 world regions interact 6 periods: 1800-1840, 1840-1880, 1880-1910, 1910-1950, 1950-1990, 1990-2025). Other categories of public expenditure [eg, security spending] have no robust significant impact on productivity growth.

Harvard realist Stephen Walt just came out with a piece titled, “Chinese Hegemony Might Be Happening.” His argument is more modest and muddled than the title suggests, but the question/fear/hope of “Chinese hegemony” has underpinned everything in how the US has approached China for the last decade and a half.

It’s also something my co-author Mike Brenes and I seriously considered in our book The Rivalry Peril (which for some reason is available on Amazon right now for only $3!). Contrary to what much of Washington assumes, we came to the conclusion that China cannot achieve global hegemony even if it wanted to, which we believe it does not want at any rate. It’s not even clear China could achieve hegemony within East Asia.1 And that means that much of Washington’s “strategic competition” fetish is unwarranted and counterproductive.

Walt’s point was that US alliances can’t prevent Chinese dominance…and that’s true. But alliances are not a constitutive feature of hegemonic order and much hinges on what people mean by dominance and hegemony. The key is not allies but rather global public goods.

Chinese scholars sometimes write and talk about “global public goods” as infrastructure investment, AI regulation, a global green transition, and global South debt—all issues we refer to in The Rivalry Peril as areas ripe for great-power collaboration. But these are not global public goods that we’re used to associating with hegemonic ordering. When Western scholars talk about hegemonic order—a global or regional order constructed around a single dominant power—the defining feature is the provision of global public goods, usually mediated through international institutions that the hegemon dominates.

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A hegemon is only “necessary” when the goods it provides are non-substitutable (that is, things only the dominant power can provide): The stability of an economic order; the stability of a norm-based political order (sovereign borders); and the stability of open shipping lanes/open commons. Those are things that China is not providing and cannot provide at a global scale. They are also things that the US actively menaces (even before Trump) and now rhetorically repudiates too. So the way that China might be conceiving of global public goods is just different from the public goods that we’re used to expecting as part of a hegemonic order.

What this means is that China cannot be hegemon and likely never will be—that’s just an anachronistic way of thinking about the world. Alternatively, it’s possible to argue that China is coming into a quasi-hegemonic role that redefines what’s expected of a dominant power…assuming it doesn’t crash into a declining superpower on a meth bender in the meantime.

But in either case, we’re undoubtedly in a post-hegemonic world.

The sources of order are elusive, but they were always illusory to a degree anyway—America-furnished public goods were not good for all, nothing was as open as the rhetoric supposed, and the entire package functioned as the legitimation of so much violence and predation at any rate. International orders do not require hegemons, and a world without empire—my project—presupposes a world without hegemon. So goodbye to all of that.

ICYMI, we covered the US-China summit in the latest episode of the pod:

My co-hosts Matt Duss and Julia Gledhill rejoined me for this episode of the pod, covering:

• Trump’s summit with China’s Xi Jinping—what it means for rivalry, the permanent war economy, strategic stability, and US imperial decline.

• Why are most Democrats getting outmaneuvered by Trump on China?

• The deep sexual anxieties underneath the White House’s anti-democratic counter-terrorism strategy.

• Graham Platner takes the lead in defining the working class and left populism.

• Why military spending is out of control, and who benefits.

• Oligarchs have realized they don’t need us and are proceeding to render us into labor surplus…you don’t want to know where this goes next.

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

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

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ICYMI:

Sebastian Gorka was counter-terrorism czar during the first year of Trump 1.0, but got shitcanned as swiftly as he had been hired. Don’t call it a comeback. In America, anyone (who’s a bootlicking white man willing to serve evil) can Forrest Gump their way to success. Back in the fold of Trump 2.0, Gorka just authored the White House’s new “counter-terrorism strategy.”

People who study counter-terrorism—not my people, btw—called it “largely slop,” “utterly unhinged,” and an “exercise in gaslighting, partisanship and obsequiousness.” It’s notable mostly because it targets leftists as a priority, building on NSPM-7. That’s both flagrantly anti-democratic and a waste of resources. Ken Klippenstein is all over this if you want to read more about the genuine threat posed to all of us if the language in the document is to be taken seriously.

What I want to draw attention to though is the absurdist way in which anyone who takes peace, democracy, or equality seriously is being designated a threat.

In an interview rolling out the document, a reporter from the right-wing Daily Caller asked Gorka about the Iran war and whether that will cause more terrorism. Even MAGA journalists apparently understand that if you want to prevent terrorism, you ought to avoid actions that precipitate terrorism. Gorka replied by calling that a “Low T approach” and accusing anyone who thought that way of being “testicularly challenged.”

I’m as unsurprised as I am embarrassed for this pudgy Dracula wannabe. You see, Gorka was a D-list celebrity cartoon character during his previous stint in government. So much so that he was actually on that Cameo app. I’ll never forget a delicious piece Dan Nexon wrote back in 2017 just roasting Gorka’s lack of expertise in anything at all: “Sebastian Gorka May Be a Far-Right Nativist, but for Sure He’s a Terrible Scholar.”

And yet.

To call Gorka’s counter-terror imaginary a farce is at once obviously true and terrifying in its real-world consequences. You can feel that in your bones when you read about how CT operations work now. The LA Times just had a piece depicting the cold-blooded, Palantir-enabled illegal assassination of someone in Lebanon:

every time Ahmad Turmus looked up, it seemed to be circling over him, like an all-too-patient bird of prey. So when the phone rang as he was visiting family one Monday afternoon in February, Turmus wasn’t too surprised that the person speaking accented Arabic was an Israeli military officer.

What surprised him was the question. “Ahmad, you want to die with those around you or alone?”…

When he hung up, his face changed, family members told The Times. He told them the Israelis were after him, and that they should leave the house and let him die alone. They pleaded with him to try to escape, to give him some disguise so he could leave.

But Turmus refused. He went to the door. “They know my face. There’s nothing we can do against this,” he said. His wife was walking in as he left, but he didn’t acknowledge her, family members said, so she wouldn’t try to stop him. He got in his car, started it up, and drove off. Less than 30 seconds later came the shriek of the two missiles that lanced through Turmus’ car.

The piece reads like lethality porn—propaganda trying to subtly terrorize us with tales of Israeli and US tech-enabled ruthlessness. But it vivifies what we’re up against.

Anyone struggling for human liberation—or even just a less shitty world—has to contend with the power and unaccountability of the modern national security state. The techniques perfected during the War on Terror were limited by scope and capacity—fascist targeting of certain types of brown-and-bearded people, but not everyone. Targeting everyone wasn’t even possible.

Gorka’s mangled understanding of the world solves for the scope limitation, ensnaring anyone who’s not a fellow bootlicker. AI, meanwhile, solves for the capacity problem, allowing for the surveillance, control, and repression of anyone, at scale, and with ever-shifting criteria for targeting.

We have not only let our national security states act with impunity; we have allowed them to get way too powerful. Now, an unqualified racist, ignoramus with deep sexual insecurities is providing strategic direction to the most lethal oppression machine ever known and laughing at us all as he gives interviews to an overly credulous, despot-laundering media apparatus.

Do you see a problem here?

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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Next week I’ll be giving a public lecture to the New Zealand Fabian Society about the proliferation of imperialist geopolitics, the end of American hegemony, and the rise of what I call “repressive capital.” It’s an ambitious argument that I’m hoping to build on, and whose diagnosis will help us better strategize within our conjuncture.

If you’re in Wellington, come in person! Registration is free. For most of you who aren’t willing to travel to hang out with me for 90 minutes, it’ll also be live-streamed.

Imperial End Times: The Geopolitics of Class War in a Post-American World

Our governments are clinging to outdated mental maps of the world—maps that obscure the pain and profit associated with their foreign-policy choices. In this public talk, Dr. Van Jackson diagnoses our moment of global “polycrisis” as a crisis of capitalism anchored to a single declining hegemon. The United States has repudiated its former global role; the world is becoming more multipolar; and prolonged economic stagnation is plaguing the global North and South to varying degrees. These forces are propelling modern national states toward “primitive accumulation”—using state power to hoard both wealth and security at the expense of the working classes. Linking America’s permanent war economy to the rentier economies of wealthy nations like New Zealand, Jackson argues that imperialist statecraft is becoming a more common mode of geopolitics—a mode that benefits oligarchs and turns the institutions of “national security” against us all. Refusing this dystopian trajectory means struggling to retain our shared humanity and construct a global order without empire.

When:

May 19th, 2026 from 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM

Location:

2/57 Willis Street
Wellington,
New Zealand

Registration:

https://www.fabians.org.nz/index.php?option=com_civicrm&task=civicrm/event/info&Itemid=75&reset=1&id=719

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Is a new Non-Aligned Movement emerging (and is it trying to counter the US)?

What was the original Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War? What was the New International Economic Order, and why did it disappear?

What prospects are there for a global order in a post-hegemonic, post-American, multipolar world?

And what does the US Democratic Party have to do with all these questions?

Dr. Nils Gilman joins me on the pod to tackle all those questions and more by way of his new essay in Dissent Magazine called “A New Non-Aligned Movement?” Catch the episode wherever you get podcasts, or watch on YouTube.

Nils Gilman’s essay in Dissent: https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/a-new-non-aligned-movement/

Nils’s Substack:

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ICYMI:

Hamilton: An American Musical might be the last mass cultural object.

The hip-hop kid in me was a sucker for the catchy beats and word play. The earnest liberal in me was validated by the black and brown representation of America’s white, slave-owning founding fathers. Above all, the musical made you feel good about the inheritance of being an American.

But when I just re-watched Hamilton for my other show, Bang-Bang, I was aghast. The cringe was so bad that I wanted to climb under a rock. I’m not trying to be dramatic, but I am profoundly embarrassed by the political culture of 2015-2017 that I swam in. If you haven’t revisited Hamilton in a while—especially if you were a fan when it first dropped—you should check in just to see if it’s as you remember. Because it’s totally freaking not.

This video of Lin-Manuel Miranda shilling for the Hillary Clinton campaign, for example, is at once catchy and the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen on behalf of a presidential candidate who was so terrible she made the American people revolt and choose the guy who promised to burn everything down:

“You register to vote and it’s on. Post that Hillary sign up on your lawn.”

“Tim Kaine in the membrane. Tim Kaine in the brain!”

“Hillary makes each decision, lookin’ at the world from a rarefied position.”

Fuck you! Lin-Manuel Miranda is a creative genius with good intentions. But there is no limit to the contempt I feel for an artist who takes Biggie’s “Ten Crack Commandments” and repackages it to celebrate a warmonger for president.

Miranda hip-hop laundered the atrocities at the heart of American history. Alexander Hamilton was an enemy of the working man, a monarchist, an anti-democratic reactionary…and Lin-Manuel Miranda made us celebrate both him and a revolution of slavers who were rebelling against the British partly because they wanted to takeover the American continent and wipe out the indigenous population while preserving the institution of slavery.

And here’s the thing. Most of us simply didn’t know American history in any serious way at the time Hamilton came out. I guess you can’t fault us for having a glossy, cherrypicked understanding of our past if we literally didn’t know better. But what we’ve all learned over the past decade makes Hamilton age…not well, no matter how much it makes your foot tap.

Erasing crimes and ignominy but calling it idealism or patriotism is itself a crime. Worst of all, it’s a crime that’s impossible to get away with. As we discuss in the episode, the earnest liberals who failed to grapple with how America has related to the world would never see someone like Trump coming until it’s too late. They don’t even have a way to make sense of him. I know because I was one of those earnest liberals, and perhaps you were too. But the shock of Trump helped the scales fall from my eyes, eventually. The price of seeing differently, though, is that I can no longer look upon Hamilton the same way I once did.

If Hamilton was the last mass cultural object, then good riddance to mass culture.

Catch The Bang-Bang Podcast’s exploration of Hamilton with guest comedian Orli Matlow:

Bang-Bang

Hamilton: An American Musical (2015) w/ Orli Matlow | Ep. 67

Comedian and podcaster Orli Matlow, who hosts War is Stupid: An Anti-War Podcast About War, joins Van and Lyle for a conversation about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton that turns out to be less about the musical’s politics than about how three very different people found themselves in three very different relationships to it. Orli came up through musical theater and loves…

Listen now

a month ago · 1 comment · Van and Lyle are Bang-Bang

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“K” is both the shape of immiseration and the permanent war economy.

We’re living in a moment where flagrantly illegal wars are ravaging the human condition. And I don’t just mean in the places where bombs rip through the flesh of the innocent. I also mean in the places in whose name savagery is waged. The ability to secure a decent, stable life in even the bosom of empire has been declining precipitously. And while Trump and the counter-revolutionary project he’s unwittingly carrying out is accelerating immiseration, it is, by various measures, a secular trend:

These circumstances have aroused the curiosity of the business press. Markets are doing well and corporate profits are high, yet human insecurity is growing amid globe-ruining imperial wars of choice. How to explain this?

A recent piece in the Financial Times did a surprisingly good—but incomplete—job of exploring this question. The upshot:

the paradox of 2026. War in the Gulf has created “the biggest energy crisis in history”…Violence has consumed other parts of the Middle East, as well as Sudan and Ukraine; populism, nationalism and angry polarisation are rising in the west; debt burdens are sky-high; climate change is accelerating; and the AI revolution that so thrills Silicon Valley titans is also threatening to destroy jobs. Meanwhile, American consumer confidence has slumped to its lowest level on record. But that is only one side of the story…The global economy is still growing by more than 3 per cent a year. And perhaps most surprisingly, America’s stock market has recently been hitting record highs…

What FT has come around to realizing is that market prices no longer reflect either consumer sentiment, employment levels, or expectations around wage growth or productivity. I wrote last year for Labor Notes about how the most politically influential sections of the capitalist class no longer require a healthy economy. Troublingly, the oligarchic class is positioned to actually benefit from an economic recession, whether caused by war or other circumstances.

There’s more than one reason for this disconnect between the market and the economy, and some of those reasons are explored in the FT piece.

First, stock markets are not representative of how the economy or its population is doing as a whole. Big Tech’s seven major firms—NVIDIA, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla—make up more than half of the S&P’s total returns and one-third of its total value. In 2025 alone, 80% of all stock market gains were traceable to AI-related purchases, investments, and production. And as FT reports, “the wealthiest 10 per cent of Americans own 88 per cent of equities, by value.”

As long as the AI bubble doesn’t pop and Big Tech turns in high profits, the market should be frothy, even though most people are living on the misery side of the K-shaped economy that results from this brutal reality:

Second, tech has infiltrated the trading process itself:

60 per cent to 80 per cent of all trading flows are driven by computer programs and algorithms. This reflects the rising prominence of exchange traded funds (which automatically buy stocks to reflect the overall index) and high-speed algorithmic trading by hedge funds (to exploit gaps in asset prices before humans have any chance of seeing them with the naked eye).

So most market activity is being moved by robotic herd dynamics, arbitrage, and previously programmed decisions to automatically buy and sell under specified conditions. Thus, market movements, even when they are tenuously connected to the real economy, are heavily mediated by techno-decision-making not correlated to real-world events in any predictable way.

Third, it’s early days and, unlike Asian and European countries, the US economy is not directly exposed to supply shocks from the current war with Iran. Scott Bessent said as much last month. What this means, though, is not that Americans are fine while the world burns; that is merely the myth of divisible security. What it means is that markets will “correct downward”—shit themselves—when they have to start pricing in reduced global oil supply, higher global prices, higher global interest rates, and fiscal recessions among America’s many trading partners. So America’s on a lag.

Ultimately, though, America runs on a permanent war economy, and it’s the oligarchs—not normal people—who benefit from that.1 Private equity and venture capital are increasingly vested in military-tech industries. 80% of the discretionary budget is slated to go to the Pentagon now. For a certain section of the capitalist class, forever wars are a precondition for growing wealth in a depressed fiscal environment. As Shana Marshall concluded in a recent report: “The cycle of militarization, violence, public austerity and private accumulation is self-reinforcing.”

The K-shaped economy is the sterile, economistic way to talk about a nation with two economies—one where regular people eat shit, another where oligarchs distort public policy while renting blood boys and buying bunkers. Illegal wars are demonstrably bad for people who need affordable food or energy or access to cheap credit, but those are not the people the state cares about.

Our big 300th episode of The Un-Diplomatic Podcast!

• Why Americans no longer believe the hype about the China threat.

• Inside Marco Rubio’s imperial control of the Panama Canal and Panama’s expropriation of a Chinese company’s assets.

• Israeli piracy targets the Gaza Sumud Flotilla, creating “Apartheid without borders.”

• Why Graham Platner’s victory in the Democratic primary for Maine’s senate seat is so important for the antifascist, antiwar movement.

• And the role of multilateralism in forging a global imperialist order.

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

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

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

I commiserated for sure but was wired differently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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