The Un-Diplomatic Podcast

What does war and violence abroad do to politics at home?  Why were early Cold War intellectuals obsessed with who "lost China?" And what did the realists of the 1940s and 1950s believe about not just the limits of American power but how US hegemony might be the road to fascism in America?  John Delury sits down with Van to discuss all that and more as part of his new book, Agents of Subversion: T...

In this interview episode, Van sits down with Professor Jeanne Morefield to discuss critiques of liberalism and empire. Why does liberalism seem to always be obsessed with crisis and triumphalism, often at once? What is the shared DNA of Edwardian imperialism, neoconservatism, and liberal internationalism? Why has G. John Ikenberry's theoretical project of liberal hegemony recently pivoted from Wo...

In this interview episode, Van sits down with Professor Jeanne Morefield to discuss critiques of liberalism and empire. Why does liberalism seem to always be obsessed with crisis and triumphalism, often at once? What is the shared DNA of Edwardian imperialism, neoconservatism, and liberal internationalism? Why has G. John Ikenberry's theoretical project of liberal hegemony recently pivoted from Wo...

Van, Kate, and Hunter unpack the mass uprisings in China, situating them in the context of ongoing worker struggles. They probe weaponized anti-semitism. They discuss the origins of Sino-US rivalry and the analytical perils of American exceptionalism. And. bring forth tons of data showing the difference between left and right radicalism.  Dove and Crane Collective Statement: https://www.doveandcra...

In this episode, Van chats with David Parsons, host of The Nostalgia Trap.  They talk about his upbringing in Ventura, California during the 1990s, why he's obsessed with '90s pop culture and film, the nightmarish state of being a perpetual precarious academic historian, and what got him into the podcast game. They also discuss his fascinating book, Dangerous Grounds: Antiwar Coffeehouses and Mili...

What is neoliberalism and why did developing democracies embrace labor repression? Why is military Keynesianism both dangerous and unsustainable? What are the causes of inflation right now, and how does monetary policy undermine the Biden presidency? And what happened to the "East Asian model" of economic development? In this political economy episode, Van Jackson sits down with Adam Dean and Tim...

Where have all the peace intellectuals gone?  How do you make enemies into friends?  What's it like to be mixed-race in national security?  Should we do away with economic sanctions entirely?  Is it easier to shape the world than to shape China?  What's Russia's freaking problem?   Seva Gunitsky Tweet: https://twitter.com/SevaUT/status/1462766445121650696 Ben Scott Tweet: https://twitter.com/Ben_G...

In this special one-off episode of the pod, Van Jackson joins a panel hosted at Australian National University's Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, alongside Greg Raymond, Ian Hall, and Yun Jiang. The topic: "Whataboutism" and the China debate. The great American political scientist Seymour Lipset once said, “they that know only one country, know no countries”. This panel addresses the iss...

Lyle Jeremy Rubin joins the podcast to talk about his new memoir "Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine's Unbecoming." Lyle and Van discuss the way that hypocrisy radicalizes people, the trouble with imperialism, the psychosexual insecurities mixed into military life, how personal violence affects foreign policy, the Karate Kid, the paradoxically traumatizing lack of combat on the front line...

Central banks are using inflation to fight a class war. America's Pacific sphere of influence is making it paranoid--what ham-fisted skullduggery in the Marshall Islands reveals. Was George W. Bush more fascist than Trump? Taiwan policy is on militarist auto-pilot--why Chris Murphy is worried. Why red-scare propaganda is bad for democracy.  What about an Un-Diplomatic newsletter (note: this episod...

This episode is from an original release in January 2022. Dr. Van Jackson sits down with John Feffer, co-director of the Foreign Policy in Focus project at the Institute for Policy Studies.  They talk about John's new book, Right Across the World: The Global Networking of the Far-Right and the Left Response.  They also talk about writing novels and plays as a foreign policy analyst, or doing forei...

Why self-determination for Guam is better strategy than persisting as an American colony. Why oligarchic concentrations of wealth in the US and China need ethnonationalism...and why that's dangerous. The Atlantic Council scandal. Are we in a new Taiwan Strait crisis? Clarifying the #NotAMarxist thing. And what Brazilian jiu jitsu can and can't do for international relations.  Contributors: Hunter...

In this deliciously radical episode, Dr. Van Jackson sits down with Malcolm Harris, author of Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials, and the forthcoming Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World.  Malcolm explains how political economy made Millennials, what's wrong with thinking of yourself as human capital, the crisis of student debt, and how he moved from anti-war prote...

In this special episode, Dr. Van Jackson sits down as part of a guest lecture/seminar at the Catholic University of America with Dr. Andrew Yeo (CUA, Brookings Institution).  They talk foremost about how we got North Korea policy so wrong and how to fix it, but in so doing they also talk about best practices of strategy, risk realism, and how Van's background shapes his thinking about war and nati...

If you pit human rights against security, you're doing foreign policy wrong.  How to think about LGBTQIA-plus rights and strategy.  Being realistic about China-Cambodia relations.  Why Biden is still ambiguous about Taiwan.  Dissecting what's wrong with the national security "Blob."  The role of a PMC technocracy in a social democratic order.  The importance of libraries to society.  Peter Beinart...

What's the difference between good strategy and bad strategy? Why is understanding strategy as a theory of success so powerful? What is a framework for good strategy? And how grand is grand strategy? Dr. Van Jackson sits down with Dr. Jeff Meiser (University of Portland) to discuss. They also talk about Richard Rumelt's classic book, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy.

The deep dive on the Philippines presidential election and what it means that they elected Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. Have Democrats become the party of war? Yes, but maybe not for long. Is the right running a restraint foreign policy?  Hell no.  The prospects of a Putin nuclear war.  Why new hip-hop is not as good as the old stuff.  Military Keynesianism is a sucker's bet.  Feminism and intersectional...

The realists versus leftists thing, again. Re-imagining international cooperation. Why peace and anti-militarism should be non-partisan. Oligarchs like Elon Musk will be the end of us all.  The curious case of Kamala Harris's restrainer space policy.  Our new YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_42j11ZVmlF5jVbqdVcdog Matt Duss Tweet: https://twitter.com/mattduss/status/1516046414723...

What Singapore's Prime Minister has to say about post-primacy Asia. The global peace dividend initiative. War as the enemy of progress. The problem with securitizing the climate crisis. MAGA militarism and the problem of red-brown alliances. Why there is no economic equality without political equality.   The Un-Diplomatic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_42j11ZVmlF5jVbqdVcdog...

In this episode of the Un-Diplomatic Podcast, Dr. Van Jackson interviews Dr. Mark Beeson about his new book, Environmental Anarchy: Security in the 21st Century. They talk about doing international relations in an era of climate crisis, Asian security, the promise and perils of Marxist theory, the problem of neoliberalism, progressive alliances with realists, democracy on the back foot, and much m...

What security studies was like in the utopian '90s.  The West's sphere-of-influence reaction to the China-Solomon Islands agreement.  What the Kanye West documentary teaches us about the bygone hustle culture.  That time when The History Channel pitted game theory against Nostradamus, and brought in John Mearsheimer to attack Bruce Bueno De Mesquita.  Why Republicans are lost on Russia-Putin. Rob...

In the first ever reveal of his forthcoming book, Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace, Dr. Van Jackson attempts to untangle the politics, economics, security, and strategic statecraft in an Asia-Pacific region experiencing accelerated change. Jackson focused on how regional change can affect U.S. alliance partners such as South Korea while shedding some light...

In our first ever roundtable edition of the podcast, Dr. Van Jackson was joined by Korea watchers Dr. John Delury (Yonsei University), Minseon Ku (Ohio State University), and Karl Friedhoff (Chicago Council on Global Affairs) to discuss the closest presidential election in South Korean history, in which conservative Yoon Seok-youl won by a razor-thin margin.  The crew talks about the popular polit...

Thomas Piketty's answer for fighting China: Democratic socialism! Is grand strategy a theory of national success, or a story? How the national security community fetishized its own paranoia about gray zones and hybrid war. How corporations woke-wash capital. The John Mearsheimer controversy and what it means for realism. Pompeo's Taiwan grift. Favorite Marvel superhero movies. Jeffrey Meiser Tweet...

The Australian right's red-baiting flop on China. New Zealand's trucker protests have morphed into a mob.   Dwayne Johnson could actually be the next president because America loves unqualified "cool bros."  How Van has evolved on China rivalry stuff.  Progressives debate Russia-Ukraine.  South Korean nukes.  The limits of Ben & Jerry's theory of peace.   Jake Grumbach Tweet: https://twitter.com/J...