Jet Lag is Truth Serum: An American Travelog
It’s weird visiting a place I know in my bones, and that I study from afar, but that has also been undergoing some changes since I left. I’ve been seeing America as a kind of insider-outsider.
If there’s a singular theme from the trip overall so far, it’s that there are a lot of (mostly young) people who are fighting every fight they can for a better version of the world, from their position in the metropole/America. I’ve been invigorated by the conversations and stories I heard all across the country.
I love finding people in my tribe. The young ones in particular are all too aware that the deck of power is stacked against a democracy worthy of the name in so many ways, yet they seem entirely undaunted. Their world is on fire, in many senses; what else they gonna do?
Some stream-of-consciousness thoughts
Public spaces in New York and DC are increasingly high-design yet weirdly inhospitable. Large, sleek, open spaces that makes loitering physically difficult. It sucks compared to what it could be.
I profile MAGA people everywhere I go. Not intentionally. But sometimes they’re wearing those stupid hats, and even when they don’t it’s kind of obvious.
It feels refreshing—even safe—seeing so many Black and Latino faces. Not many of either in New Zealand. I had a conversation with this girl that had a Brooklyn accent and it damn near made me cry; couldn’t have felt more at home.
I miss Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s so much! I chatted with a couple workers from each to talk about their struggle to unionize. They need more salts because there’s A LOT of corporate pressure creating a climate of fear. And except for salts, most of them need the job.
I brought too many pairs of pants and not enough sweaters.
Riding the Acela train was great.
Tipping has been built into all service transactions, and it’s weird that people think it’s not weird. Tipping is great to show gratitude, but terrible when it inevitably becomes the basis for employers to underpay their staff. Charity has been built into American capitalism as a mechanism of its reproduction, which is perverse (New Zealand is against tipping, sometimes stridently so, and they pay a much higher minimum wage accordingly).
I eat a pretty restricted diet and it was kind of hard to find decent eats in the parts of NY, DC, and Massachusetts that travelers occupy. A little easier in New Haven.
I met so many people here for the first time—all of whom were really cool—but have known many of them via social media or email exchanges for years. Bona fide friends in pretty much every case. I even relied on some of them to get around and play host for me. Parasocial ties are more authentic than people think.
Signing copies of your book for people is emotionally taxing. It’s an honor to be asked, and you simply can’t refuse…and yet I have chicken-scratch for handwriting and am never sure what to write. The greater your social anxiety, the more likely you are to straight up dread book signings.
Beyond those random observations, the substance of each leg of the trip had some useful takeaways.
Washington’s Dark Cloud, and Silver Lining
In the span of two days, I had three private meetings, a briefing on the Hill challenging sacred cows on China policy, a workshop dinner where I was the guest speaker on a progressive China policy, and a book event at Busboys & Poets for Grand Strategies of the Left. Exhausting? 100%. Worth it? 100%.
In much of Washington, Gaza has been metabolized as an electoral question, and everyone has opinions of convenience about how US support for ongoing Israeli war crimes affects the outcome. (I heard several people who were generally favorable toward Biden say something that’s logically impossible—foreign policy won’t affect the election outcome but if Biden withheld aid and demanded an end to Israel’s war, then Democrats would be wiped out by AIPAC and he could lose his Jewish donors.)
China, though, featured prominently in EVERY conversation. Washington is stuck on great-power competition, and Gaza hasn’t dislodged that. Frankly, I didn’t expect it to; retooling the national security state for China rivalry creates path dependence.
The trouble with that, obviously, is that conditions with China could change favorably in the future and we’ll be institutionally stuck in a deeply antagonistic posture toward China—we’re positioned to sabotage any positive (albeit unlikely) changes that might emerge. And if the CCP is even a little perceptive, they see our institutional lock-in as a sign of long-term confrontation for which they must plan accordingly. We wake up every day and make the world we live in.
The insistence on trying to elevate “great-power competition” to the status of the new “the end of history” paradigm within which all reality gets filtered is problematic on its own terms. The resources and attention share that anti-China-ism commands necessarily deprives policymakers of the ability to deal with real problems.
The worst part, though, is that they’re obsessed with treating China as their theater of agony. Washington has a dangerously distorted image of China because it suits them; they refuse to take China on its own terms. In such a context, more bureaucratic resources dedicated to China will not yield better insights; good money after bad. And bad analysis inevitably produces bad choices.
It was cool watching my friend Matt Duss in action. Savvy politico with a principled commitment to peace, democracy, and equality; very rare. Most of my work in DC was brokered by the Center for International Policy (CIP), which he’s helping build into a powerhouse for genuinely progressive, antimilitarist foreign policy. The empire-building has only just begun, but CIP is already punching above its weight.
When I’m of a more sober mind (still jetlagged and still traveling), I’ll write up my reflections on the progressive China policy discussion. It was great in the sense that it was exceedingly candid…but disturbing and validating of my belief that the only hope for a saner foreign policy is aligning progressive ideas with Justice Democrats, sympathetic Hill staffers, and the public. The Biden administration is hopeless unless there’s a radical personnel change.
Yale University’s Worldmakers in Training
NGL, the ruling class seduced me a little.
Yale had cool architecture. I got to hang out with my friend and co-author Mike Brenes. And the food, OMG. Best sushi I’ve had in three years. For the dinner party/salon after, we went to a restaurant called Barcelona, which served up the best paella I’ve ever had.
Even with a disappearing voice and jet lag, the dinner was one of the most enjoyable of my life (in the top ten, at least). In a room of maybe 30 people, everyone was vibing; doesn’t happen often.
But the food and good company was the cherry on top. I was in New Haven under the auspices of the Brady-Johnson Grand Strategy Program at Yale, toward which I’ve thrown shade in the past (it’s a different program right now). I gave a deliciously meandering talk that yoked together Pacific Power Paradox, a short discussion of my political evolution, and Grand Strategies of the Left.
The students I chatted with were smart and ambitious in all the right ways (I’m sure there were some Brooks Brothers/J Press types but somebody was smart enough to keep them away from me I guess). Did not expect to find any class consciousness at one of the premier sites of oligarchic social reproduction, but I did. From work on climate activism and anti-statist hyperlocalism (low-key anarchism?), to thinking through how to salt workplaces, these folks impressed me.
On my way out, I met with a group of female students who had just founded The Policy and Political Economy Collective, and was absolutely floored by their interest in raising class consciousness and challenging the content of how IPE is taught at Yale. Looking forward to what they do.
Election Politics & Foreign Policy in Amherst
Security in Context hosted me as part of a public event at Hampshire College on foreign policy and the presidential election, which was both intellectually stimulating and timely. There’s video of the event that I should be able to share soon.
The best part, on a personal level, was getting to hang out with my friends Spencer Ackerman, Omar Dahi, and Amel Ahmed—impressive people who know things I don’t know, and who share in my larger project.
Among the highlights:
We all had unqualified praise for the creativity of the “uncommitted” vote in the Democratic presidential primary as a way for voters to signal their demand to stop supporting Israel’s genocidal war…but we all saw it as a tactic that probably won’t succeed because it’s not part of a larger strategy.
Biden’s foreign policy, of which we were all vehement critics, might outlive him (that’s bad). But the scarier prospect is that the next generation of Democratic foreign policy could be much worse/evil. There’s currently very little basis to expect that US foreign policy will become more enlightened, cooperative, generous, restrained, or demilitarized.
We collectively worried that the Democratic Party is fishing for a new constituency to substitute for Arab-Americans and the antiwar grassroots. Currently, Biden is busy courting Nikki Haley voters (not kidding) while approving new arms sales to Israel. And it’s worth remembering there’s a precedent for something like that: Democrats forsook the working classes in the ‘80s when they decided to chase white-collar, suburban “middle class” voters as the center of their imagined political constituency.
More soon! ✌️