Appearance on The Majority Report to Talk China-Threat Politics

Duuuude! I had to wake up at 3:30 AM to go on The Majority Report, but it was worth it. The convo was delicious. Their audience is massive. And as I said at the top of the interview, I've been watching and listening to their show for closing in on six years, so getting the call-up was a treat.

You can barely tell that I was speaking at 4am. I got to plug Pacific Power Paradox, but the 25-minute discussion was entirely about the intersection of Washington politics, the intellectual bankruptcy of Democratic Party foreign policy intellectuals, and China rivalry.

We do talk a bit about the history of Sino-US detente from 1979 to today, and as part of that there are four big takeaways from the convo:

1)  Neoliberals were the political constituency doing the most to preserve Sino-US detente and hold back the pull toward great-power rivalry. Now that neoliberalism has fallen on hard times as a slogan (love to see it), the main consequence has not been building a post-neoliberal economy but rather the empowerment of militarists (hate to see it).

2) The national security state and MAGA politicians are the only beneficiaries so far from great-power rivalry.

3) We're re-tooling not just US foreign policy but the American economy and society for war optimization at the expense of war prevention.

4) The future of war and the future of the Military-Industrial Complex is benchmarked against great-power war. War-on-terror struggles doesn't require the US to spend on sexy capital-intensive weapons technologies--only great-power war does.

Check out the full convo here: https://www.youtube.com/live/WOzI4zUZFrs?feature=share&t=1560