The Un-Diplomatic Podcast

Recorded on location in the wilds of New Zealand’s Kapiti Coast. Why is America declining? Grand strategists, pundits, and scholars have been debating the best label for US foreign policy during the Trump presidency: illiberal hegemony; neo-royalism; reactionary nationalism; predatory hegemony. But none of these labels offer an account of themselves. Why is the US engaged in predatory behavior abr...

How the Pentagon is facilitating the rapid expansion "ghost network" concentration camps in America. Why arms control is dying and what to make of the New START Treaty's expiration. Jeff Bezos has effectively killed The Washington Post--what's next? Why neoconsevative foreign policy hawks still run Washington. And the importance of Gary Stevenson's story in The Trading Game for understanding the d...

The US State Department has been coordinating far right separatists in Alberta--the imperialism threat to Canada is real. Denmark's debt weapon and the EU's anti-coercion instrument got Trump to temporarily back off of invading Greenland. Why is the fantasy of returning industrial manufacturing so important to the American far right (and some progressives)? The confession of a Biden administration...

Free crossover episode with The Bang-Bang Podcast! Do US troops have a threshold for the kind of unlawful order they’re unwilling to follow? If Venezuela wasn’t a breaking point, is Greenland? Can the US have mid-term elections under martial law? Will troops fire on fellow Americans if ordered? And why is the permanent war economy at the root of everything from economic insecurity to America’s imp...

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave the most important speech about international relations in 50 years. In this episode, Dr. Van Jackson and guest Dr. Seva Gunitsky sit down to dissect Carney's speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. They discuss the many shades of realism in international relations, what it means to acknowledge the contradictions of the "rules-based international order...

Are protests in Iran a prelude to revolution? The root causes of Iranian unrest are economic. Why Joseph Stiglitz thinks it’s time to isolate and contain the United States. Why Silicon Valley’s network-state advocates have fixated on taking over Greenland, and why the geopolitics of the network state could lead to World War III. The case for nationalizing the defense industry and taking the profit...

Dr. Van Jackson tackling a host of dark issues in this episode. How to explain US imperialism in Venezuela. NATO's existential trouble and America's threat to annex Greenland. The economics of American empire. How the Trump administration quietly killed the last initiative for a progressive global order. And the struggle against A.I. data centers.  Subscribe to the Un-Diplomatic Newsletter: https:...

A special holiday crossover with The Bang-Bang Podcast! Van Jackson and Lyle Rubin are joined by the preeminent nuclear scholar Scott Sagan to discuss A House of Dynamite , the 2025 political thriller that imagines nuclear catastrophe not as spectacle or obvious madness, but as an orderly sequence of decisions made under crushing time pressure. Structured as interlocking vignettes rather than a si...

Free crossover episode with the American Prestige Podcast! Julia Gledhill and Van Jackson joined Daniel Bessner and Derek Davison to breakdown the Trump administration’s newly released National Security Strategy. They discuss how the document leans on civilizational framing, portrays competition as existential conflict, omits diplomacy and institutions in favor of coercion and deal-making, and dee...

Free crossover episode with The Jacob Shapiro Podcast! It's a strategy of primitive accumulation masquerading as a culture warrior grand strategy. It's doing white Christian nationalism as foreign policy, imperialism in Latin America, far-right revolution in Europe. And what about China? In this crossover episode between The Un-Diplomatic Podcast and The Jacob Shapiro Podcast, Dr. Van Jackson--a f...

Free episode crossover with The Bang-Bang Podcast! Van Jackson and Lyle Rubin are joined by returning guest Sam Carliner to take on Marines , Netflix’s new 250th-anniversary docuseries, an unmistakable propaganda piece (it’s literally featured on the official Marine Corps website) that nonetheless reveals more candor than the institution intended. Directed by Chelsea Yarnell, whose style veers int...

Free episode cross-over! Van Jackson appeared as a guest on Davis Ellison’s Official Positions podcast. They talk about how Van became a scholar, why he left Washington for New Zealand, the social realities of being a foreign policy wonk, the dark side of life in rich countries, what strategic studies ought to be, and how Davis himself went from being NATO analyst to being a NATO critic.  Check ou...

Why regime-change war with Venezuela is about drugs. And cartels. And immigration. And resource exploitation. And because it will be good for inflation. And because uranium to all of the world’s bad guys. What the fuck!? Things are shaping up like a choose-your-own adventure story that fails to learn from the Iraq War. What is the Ukraine peace plan and why is it destined to fail in its current fo...

Van Jackson and Julia Gledhill link back up to discuss Bret Stephens' op-ed in the New York Times making the case for overthrowing Maduro in Venezuela...and why it's the Iraq War all over again. How the Democrats are in bed with Palantir and why they need to get out. The G-7 meeting in Canada revealed what can only be called imperialist multilateralism. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio designate...

In this crossover episode with The Time of Monsters--a podcast of The Nation Magazine--Jeet Heer and Van Jackson discuss the worldmaking of Jeffrey Epstein and the complicity of America's entire ruling class in his crimes, from Larry Summers and Leon Panetta to Trump himself. Thousands of leaked emails reported by DropSite News have revealed something about Jeffrey Epstein that few people realized...

Who’s afraid of Zohran Mamdani, and why New York newest mayor will lead to Trump escalating his war against Americans. An economic great depression is already hiding in plain sight. The Nazi debate within the Republican Party. Why the Trump administration’s war on Venezuela will expand to Colombia and Mexico. Making sense of Trump’s trip across East Asia as a symptom of hegemonic decline. Subscrib...

Xi Jinping and Donald Trump just met in South Korea, agreeing to suspend the most acute aspects of economic warfare for 12 months, lowering US tariffs on Chinese goods, and resuming Chinese purchases of US soybeans. But Dr. Van Jackson explains why the inter-imperialist rivalry between China and the US endures, why talk of a G2 is premature, and what needs to be done to address the structural sour...

Part II of our crossover episode with The Bang-Bang Podcast! Van and Lyle are joined by Sam Ratner, Policy Director at Win Without War, and Andy Facini, Communications Director at the Council on Strategic Risks, to discuss WarGames, John Badham’s Cold-War techno-thriller that accidentally foresaw the age of algorithmic warfare. What begins as a teenage prank—Matthew Broderick’s David Lightman brea...

Free crossover episode with The Bang-Bang Podcast! Van and Lyle are joined by Sam Ratner, Policy Director at Win Without War, and Andy Facini, Communications Director at the Council on Strategic Risks, to discuss WarGames , John Badham’s Cold-War techno-thriller that accidentally foresaw the age of algorithmic warfare. What begins as a teenage prank—Matthew Broderick’s David Lightman breaking into...

The RAND Corporation just cut 11% of staff--which is a further sign of a crisis of capital accumulation. The CIA is maybe rethinking China. The Trump administration is accelerating decoupling from China. Progressives and antiwar organizations send an open letter to Trump about detente with China. Graham Platner's tattoo is getting way too much attention, and also the reason he'll beat Susan Collin...

What it means that the Department of War just revoked the press credentials for more than 100 media outlets. Why the China trade crisis is a self-imposed Cuban Missile Crisis that could nuke the global economy (China has predictable control of critical minerals). Trump's covert action authorization against Venezuela is part of Monroe Doctrine 2.0. Why the criminal charges against Ashley Tellis sig...

Jamie Merchant, author of Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline, wants you to stop thinking like a policymaker! He joins the pod to talk about a new essay he has in The Brooklyn Rail about the decline and decay of the "progressive managerial state." Van and Jamie also discuss their shared critique of the book Trade Wars Are Class Wars , the contradiction of Trump's tariffs, their mixed...

Pete Hegseth's fat-generals theory of war is a stabbed-in-the-back myth meant to justify brutality. Trump's NSPM-7 is very explicitly a war on anyone who advocates for peace, democracy, and equality. The government shutdown is being used as a war on Democrats and liberal democracy. The Gaza Sumud Flotilla gets targeted by Israel, in violation of international law--why don't modern states protect t...

Why are both the left and the right opposed to the "liberal international order?" What are different schools of right-wing thought about the world, what makes the global far right a counter-order movement, and what, if anything, does it have in common with progressive foreign policy. Dr. Van Jackson, a scholar of international relations, explains the competing global visions of left and right in t...

What was the "Liberal International Order," and why did people start calling it the "Rules-Based International Order?" Why do experts debate its meaning? What good has it been? How liberal was the Liberal International Order? And why is it over? Dr. Van Jackson, a scholar of international relations, explains in this live lecture you don't want to miss. This is part one of a two-part lecture on the...