I might have mentioned once or twice that my book with Mike Brenes is out—The Rivalry Peril. It speaks powerfully to so many themes in our current moment—even Trump’s implementation of straight-up tyranny and the assertion of a truly imperial presidency.
In the book, we put great-power rivalry in historical and contemporary perspective. Historically, we devote the most time to the US-Soviet Cold War. The illiberalism and militarism of American Cold War liberalism during this era was atrocious—not worth trumpeting—and definitely not worth emulating. Geopolitical rivalry kept the Third World underdeveloped, weakened the US labor movement over time, and diverted social spending into military buildups—and that’s in addition to the atrocities and scores of coup attempts and all the rest.
So Mike and I walk through some of that history to relay that the Cold War metaphor that hawks, reactionaries, and Bidenistas invoke today when they think about China is a false one, based on a jaundiced rendering of Cold War history. There is a useful analogy to make, but it is to the regime of violence, secrecy, hierarchy, and exclusion that we pursued in the name of out-competing our rival. That’s what the Cold War was. That’s what it unleashed. And that’s the Pandora’s Box we’ve opened the past few years.
We’re sensitive to the millions upon millions of people who had to eat shit—at home and abroad—in order for the American state to increase its capacity to kill and be unaccountable to the public, and we don’t see that as something worth replaying.
At any rate, there’s a lot going on in this book and setting Cold War history straight is just the opening salvo. We also trace the multiple ways that geopolitical rivalry benefits reactionary forces in society (a recurring theme of this newsletter). We lay out our “theory” of China fully and transparently to establish that Washington is full of habitual threat inflators. We explain the hopefully obvious point that great-power competition increases risks of war and structural violence abroad. And we have a chapter arguing that geopolitical rivalry also imperils economic democracy.
It is this chapter about the political economy of great-power competition, if you will, that I think is most unconventional but also most profound and most thoroughly argued.
If you’re on the fence about buying the book, Foreign Policy magazine allowed us to publish an essay for them explaining how great-power competition is bad for the working class. It draws heavily from our chapter on economic democracy. A preview of that essay and a link to the full version is below. ✌️
What does economic inequality have to do with great-power competition? Much more than you might think. Congress and the White House currently direct resources toward the national security state and away from programs and policies that support the public welfare. There is no inherent compromise between investing in defense over social welfare—but in the United States, we have a politically imposed trade-off between “guns and butter.”
Geopolitical rivalry provides legitimacy for policies that undermine economic freedoms. Many of these are justified in the name of “national security,” which too often functions as a euphemism for militarist policies that foment aggression while starving the welfare state. The consequences of militarism stretch far beyond the battlefield, worsening economic inequality and foreclosing even the prospect of economic democracy, which operates on the presumption that economic disenfranchisement breeds electoral disenfranchisement.
Such a claim might be jarring to some because war can, sometimes, supplement economic prosperity. Mobilizing for World War II helped end the Great Depression and initially contributed to the postwar boom. The outbreak of the Korean War offered a boon to U.S. unions and the U.S. manufacturing base during the early 1950s. So-called military Keynesianism has provided well paying, often unionized jobs for thousands of Americans since the early Cold War.
But in times of widespread and extreme inequality (which is the case today), war, or “great-power competition,” creates greater economic precarity. Not only does rivalry empower the already powerful; it further marginalizes the powerless. Great-power rivalry with China has helped concentrate wealth in the hands of a few, rather than creating a healthy economy. It has weakened the welfare state and stymied economic democracy. And these trends may worsen during the new Trump administration, which has vowed to stay tough on China…
Read the full essay here.
Buy the book here (or wherever you get fine books).
Ordered my hardcover copy of this and Grand Strategies directly from the publishers. Can't wait to read them.
Crushing the book promotion game!