When I kicked around the DC think-tank scene, I worked with several younger guys I really related to even though I was a notch higher than them in the pecking order. Every Washingtonian in their 20s aspires to suit-and-tie life and they were no different, showing up for work everyday dressed for the job they wanted.
One, in particular, was just a very amenable dude; rational, liberal, go along to get along. All traits that helped him climb the ladder, eventually work in the Biden administration, and walk out the revolving door into a much higher position than when he’d entered government. When I knew him, we bonded over rap—Tupac, Lupe Fiasco, Run The Jewels.
Like everyone in our circle, we assumed preserving and growing state power—global primacy—was good for the world and therefore necessary. We were trained to believe that when it came to using force to murder others, we should be “giving the president more options.” And we took American exceptionalism for granted, which meant that no crime of our government, no failure of judgment, could ever wash away the good intentions of our elite community managing state power. How to square all that with loving Conscious Hip-Hop is something I’m still trying to figure out…
At any rate, if you pointed out to us the real harm foreign policy was causing, we had three moves (assuming we didn’t just ignore you). We would dissemble, which is to say we’d out-argue you on technicalities that amounted to whataboutism or blaming the harm on others. We would justify harm as worth whatever abstract upside we attributed to foreign policy—“the world would fall into chaos if US troops weren’t in Germany and Japan.” Or we would claim fecklessness, agreeing with you in spirit—“I hear ya, buddy!”—but shrugging with our hands up; nothing we can do about genocide or forever wars.
It took years (and distance) to finger my discomfort with this way of thinking and being. You cannot exist among well-educated people with impressive-sounding titles embodying the soulless ideology of national power and spitting a vocabulary of vacuous buzzwords without becoming like them. Practice makes habit. You are what you do repeatedly.
Given all that, I’m unsure what’s the greater miracle—that I could detect the swamp’s noxious gases poisoning me before it was too late, or that I found a way out of this bland fanaticism at all. What I do know is that I eventually had a premonition of where national security think-tank life was leading and it had me running in the other direction like the Final Girl in a horror flick. Everyone was confused by how swiftly I got out of DC once a window opened, but they hadn’t known my inner life or how I came up.
I’m haunted now by the ghost of futures past when I see friends from my old world. Not a week goes by that they’re not debasing themselves at the altar of power, (wilfully?) aloof at the sacrifices of real people for this abstraction called “national security” they so venerate. Sock puppets for not just capital but the war-profiteering and Big Tech sections of capital.
Would’ve been me if I’d stuck around Washington. It was me in a previous era, when empire’s mask hadn’t entirely fallen off.
So my gut stirs with melancholy and rage and survivor’s guilt when I see this week that an old friend—who could quote Tupac bar for bar—publicly argued that the US should be: pouring ungodly amounts of capital into AI; trying to “win” an AI rivalry with China; and stealing China’s superior technology if it gets close to inventing “artificial general intelligence.” And if nothing else works, he suggested, the US should prepare to conduct both cyberattacks and kinetic (bombing) attacks against Chinese AI infrastructure.
America must win, whatever that means, whatever that costs. Domination laundered through technocracy.
I’m repulsed. I struggle to suppress my emotions on social media, writing vicious Tweets that I never post, because I recognize the template here. Deep down, I know I would’ve made precisely this argument had I stayed on the road I was on. I made arguments like it in the mid-2010s.
By Washington standards, the bro I’m gesturing to is one of the more rational voices on foreign policy. So was I. He certainly doesn’t think of himself as a jingo. Neither did I.
And that’s what should worry you who reads this: One of the sane people in the room is thinking through, giving the president options for, and socializing the public to the prospect of launching a preventive war against China. There are many like him, and there are many more still who are much worse. And if a vanilla, progressive-except-for-primacy Democrat somehow manages to win the White House, they will rule again. In certain ways, they’re ruling now.
But Tupac had a word for those who lend their voices to the already powerful; those who are “blind to the fact,” as he liked to say, that they’re promoting a mix of neocolonialism and preventive war because it’s good for the corrupt sections of capital that fund their think tank. “Bitch-made.”
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Industrial Capitalism Needed Us. Primitive Accumulation Doesn’t.
We can’t afford blindness to the world-historical forces transforming the foundations of our reality.
That fellow stokes the fires of conflagration
As a think tank bro, I am sorry your old friend has fallen to such bad analysis.
I will gladly defend the US presence in South Korea under longstanding security conditions and support by freely elected South Korean government (not the case for the vast majority of the cold war, admittedly). I'd describe my defenses of the harms and my own failure to prevent the.very much avoidable ones differently, but fair enough. I am sure Tupac wouldn't have kind words for me.
But a preventative kinetic attack on Chinese data centers is nuts. The expected value for investors wouldn't be that great because of a non-trivial risk that we'd all be dead. I would be *fascinated* to hear about how the US would signal, "Don't worry the B-21s are just there for your data centers, nuclear C2 and facilities themselves are off the table and we're keeping it entirely conventional. But for OPSEC reasons we didn't say any of this until the bombs started falling, surely you understand that."
Last time I checked, there weren't any recent Chicago surveys of international relations professionals, but I am confident that an alternate future you would be perfectly comfortable pointing out that such a proposal is not, to use that stereotypical blob term, *serious*.
I do hope to find some good surveys here and obviously think tanks and university scholarly communities have different distributions of beliefs. But I think your view of median think tank opinion is off, even in this fallen era.