Understanding Primacy: A Hegemonicon Podcast Cross-Over

I made an appearance on what is truly one of my favorite shows, Hegemonicon, hosted by the brilliant William Lawrence (one of the founders of the Sunrise Movement). I love it because it’s about power and strategy but for people with genuine commitments to fighting fascism and building peace, democracy, and equality.

In this episode, we cover a lot of ground, including:

• What is primacy and how did it become an American strategy?

• What are the contradictions in US industrial policy?

• What alternative economic policies would be available if the US were not committed to primacy?

• What makes Stuart Hall my sensei?

• How does primacy relate to China and great-power competition?

• What kind of international order is emerging?

• What is the political coalition that can keep us out of catastrophe?

Excerpts from the episode:

On Primacy as a Mismatch with Multipolarity

Primacy is not just a ruling class deflection from problems of inequality or whatever. It’s a spatial, geopolitical fix to our relative decline…our share of control in the world system by almost any measure has been getting diluted in favor of others—most acutely relative to China, and this often gets described as “post-unipolar” or “multipolar,” right? But trying to do a strategy that requires you to have all the power in the world when you don’t—that creates a powder keg of a situation.

At the end of the Cold War we could do a primacy strategy and we didn’t have to change much about our foreign policy. But now, if your goal is to claw back a greater share of power, you have to start doing crazy shit—kneecapping your enemies, containment strategies, arms racing, blacklists, tariffs, the securitization of economic policy, which is what leads to economic nationalism…”

On Economic Nationalism and “Post-Neoliberalism”

we live in a world where only rich nations can afford to support the domestic industries of the future in the way that Bidenomics is. If it’s true that green capital and green industry is the future of the global economy, which is what Bidenomics kind of bets, well, that’s a future where nobody except for China and a few European countries can subsidize green tech the way we can. And that means the rest of the world is not competitive in the future that we’re betting on.

Bidenomics does not exist on its own. It exists to support great power competition with China. And that’s not just political framing. It’s not just rhetoric to get a bill passed. That has material consequences. US foreign policy right now. It’s actively trying to remove China from technology supply chains, right? To block Chinese state owned enterprises operating overseas. Most famously the campaign to get Huawei globally banned, which again, it had a kind of mixed record. It turns out that in a lot of developing countries, Huawei is a kind of low cost provider of digital infrastructure and cell phone towers. But US diplomacy, US political capital, is being used to basically ask the global South to choose between China and the US for economic development. And that’s a farce for many reasons, but the biggest is that the global South’s development prospects are close to zero if they can’t draw from both China and the US—our foreign policy literally keeps a large swath of the world underdeveloped.

Reckoning with Liberalism’s Contradictions

raise consciousness, point out contradictions. How do you close the gap between how we were raised—to believe certain things like genocide is bad—and then squaring that, reconciling that with how we actually exist in the world? It’s not acceptable to raise a generation of idealists and then they grow up and you tell them, “each shit, you’re going to be economically insecure the rest of your life. You’re never going to retire. And you might have to die in a nuclear war, and we’re going to genocide everybody in the name of your imperial mode of living.” This is the bargain that we’ve been handed. But if we can start to introduce that recognition into people in the national security state, help them see alternatives, help them see the contradictions…then we might get traction in some places—a lot of them are well-intentioned.

On China

China insists on unification with Taiwan but without specifying how or on what timeline…Unification by force is something Beijing has been pretty clear would only happen if Taiwan declares independence. And that could happen. But that’s not where we’re at now or where we’ve been the past decade.

Having said that, if China invaded and we decided to defend Taiwan, it means we’re willing to risk nuclear war…The balances of forces in that particular geography has favored China since around 2010, and it overwhelmingly favors China now no matter what we do…there’s no reason to expect that you can hit a nuclear power with dozens/hundreds of missiles and they not escalate to nuclear use. 

We should be doing everything in our power that doesn’t sacrifice Taiwan’s fate to avoid war with China in Taiwan. If China invaded, I think we owe Taiwan some measure of defense and support—I personally believe that security is indivisible, which means that sacrificing others is a counterproductive way of trying to secure yourself. But the greater share of our effort should not be optimizing for a literally unwinnable war—it should be on preventing that war, minimizing its chances. 

The 40+ year détente we had with China was working pretty well until we decided to throw it out, so we need to be willing to explore the basis for a new détente with China. That’s the only way we can avoid making Taiwan’s geopolitical situation worse. 

It was a long, juicy, strategic conversation—much more inside!

Get the episode wherever you listen to podcasts, as well as on the Convergence Magazine site.