Depending on when you discovered my writing or one of my shows, you may not know that I was a fairly prominent defense intellectual on the Asia beat who, over the course of Trump 1.0, got radicalized against imperialism.
Much of what you see from me these days has the conviction that there are tremendous stakes in being wrong about national security and its politics…and that almost everyone in the mainstream (including my old self) is wrong. The manic pace at which I spill ink and spit fire, though, comes from an immense feeling of guilt, even shame, about the blood-soaked imperialist project I lent my voice and brainpower to for over a decade. Writing (and podcasting) is part of my penance.
What very few people know is that I came to political consciousness in part because I reached an intellectual dead end thinking about the world like a national-security strategist. There’s more I should say about that another time, but I realized the conventional way of thinking about international security was at once full of contradictions and demonstrably self-defeating.
All of that is very personal prelude to a discussion about a radical new proposal to transform America’s military role in Asia that is upsetting much of official Washington. Among its recommendations:
End US alliances with South Korea, Japan, Australia, and the Philippines;
Drastically cut US military presence in East Asia;
Declare a non-intervention policy on Taiwan; and
Shift US military strategy from defending a “first-island chain” defense perimeter to the “second-island chain.”
This is quite an important text to critically engage with. So in the latest episode of The Un-Diplomatic Podcast, I explain and evaluate the report’s recommendations on their own terms but don’t stop there. I also specify my rubric for progressive, anti-militarist foreign policy and address the report from that perspective too. Any “progressive foreign policy” worthy of the name must focus on:
Root causes of insecurity;
Treat military threats as symptoms of those root causes; and
Decide what to do consistent with a principle of least harm.
That’s the standard that we should hold ourselves (and politicians) to, and that’s the perspective I take when engaging with the report’s recommendations.
Because of the unusual nature of this episode and the report I’m discussing, I have a full transcript of the episode below (for patrons).
Also this episode: Why the 1995 Michael Moore comedy Canadian Bacon explains the US fixation with colonizing Canada in 2026.
And in the back half of the episode: A mini-lecture on imperialist accounts of World War One, comparing how W.E.B. Du Bois and V.I. Lenin both theorized empire as the cause of World War One but in starkly different ways.