The Un-Diplomatic Podcast

Why is “debt-trap diplomacy” nothing more than an anti-China meme? Why is the geopolitical interpretation of Chinese overseas lending wrong, and what does that suggest about US/Western estimates of China’s intentions? Why do Chinese firms hate writing down unpayable debts? And why do smaller developing nations rarely benefit from international financial competition? I sat down with the great Shahar Hameiri to discuss all that and more in the latest episode of the pod.

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Shahar and Lee’s piece, “China, International Competition, and the Stalemate in Sovereign Debt Restructuring: Beyond Geopolitics.” 

Shahar Hameiri and Lee Jones, Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China’s Rise.

Deborah Brautigaum, “A critical look at Chinese ‘debt-trap diplomacy’: the rise of a meme.”

Shahar Hameiri and Lee Jones, “Debunking the Myth of Debt-Trap Diplomacy.”

This interview with the Review of Democracy podcast is the deepest dive to date on Van Jackson’s book, Grand Strategies of the Left: The Foreign Policy of Progressive Worldmaking. 

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Review of Democracy Podcast

What does Guam’s political status say about US strategic thought? What strategic choices does Guam have if it were allowed self-determination? What does America’s imperial relations with Guam have in common with the rest of the Non-Sovereign Pacific? And why does the existence of a Non-Sovereign Pacific region make both the Pacific and the great powers less secure? I assure you, you’ve never heard a foreign policy conversation like this. A hilarious, personal, and highly edifying conversation at the intersection of social justice and defense strategy, with Dr. Ken Kuper from the University of Guam.

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Further reading on Guam.

This episode is unusual, more like part of a mini-lecture series. I was asked to give a talk recently on inequality, development, and IR theory for an audience that skews quite young. I’ve chopped it up to just bring out the highlights, but we hit many topics that might be of interest:

—Why IR paradigms are not especially useful for making sense of inequality.

—Why it sucks to be poor, no matter what flag you live under.

—Capitalism v. Marxism, and by proxy, modernization theory v. dependency theory.

—Why the East Asian development model is at its end.

—Why it can be useful to think of political economy as a capitalist world system.

—Why redistribution is the only alternative to revolution if you want to reduce inequality.

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What’s wrong with liberal internationalism? What alternatives do socialists and progressives offer? Is voting more (or less) than a defensive tactic? Is the Democratic Party beyond redemption? Is China a force for good or evil in the world?  Van went on the 1 of 200 podcast to have a really real debate about everything on the left’s mind at the moment. They talk about his new book--Grand Strategies of the Left--but couch it in a larger conversation on left perspectives about foreign policy. 

1 of 200 Pod: https://www.patreon.com/1of200

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Buy Grand Strategies of the Left

How do the space-colony visions of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos meaningfully differ? What does a company like Space-X have in common with the old imperial company-states, like the British East India Company? And why are billionaire bros obsessed with “political exit” projects like seasteading and galactic escapism? We tackle all that and more with Alina Utrata, a scholar whose new article in American Political Science Review called, “Engineering Territory: Space and Colonies in Silicon Valley” is a banger.

Morris Cohen, Property and Sovereignty

Robert Nichols, Theft is Property

Alina’s Podcast

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What separates conservatives from reactionaries, and where do they converge? What are the politics inherent to counterinsurgency strategy? What does the popularity of counter-insurgency in the 21st century say about Democratic Party politics? How does small-war thinking unify counter-revolutionary monarchies with Edwardian imperialism with anti-communism? And where does David Petraeus fit into these questions?

All that and more in this wide-ranging conversation with Joseph Mackay, anchored in his award-winning book, The Counter-Insurgent Imagination: A New Intellectual History.

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What made Daniel Ellsberg—the famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower—different from today’s public intellectuals? How has the think tank environment in Washington changed over the decades? Why were the Pentagon Papers such a big deal? Why is foreign policy change so difficult? And how does progressive foreign policy fit into the story of Washington’s intellectual stagnation?

I sat down with Matthew Petti to discuss a new essay he had on the life of Daniel Ellsberg, the death of the old-style think tank, and so much more.

Matthew’s Newsletter: https://www.pettimatthew.com

Un-Diplomatic Newsletter: https://www.un-diplomatic.com

After George Floyd’s police murder and the Black Lives Matter movement explosion in 2020, the field of international relations rushed to engage the topic of race after ignoring it for half a century. When they did, they largely acted as if early generations of international-relations scholars hadn’t engaged with or theorized the topic. But they had. In this episode, Van sits down with Robbie Shilliam, a multidisciplinary IR scholar and postcolonial theorist, to talk about:

What made Hans Morgenthau a theorist of race relations, not just international relations;

Why the field of IR has a racial blind spot in the first place;

Why IR’s leading journals, editors, and scholars re-engaged racial questions after 2020 but without drawing on what the discipline’s own canonical thinkers had to say about race;

Why the Gen Z and Millennial generation of scholars are possibly built differently when it comes to racial issues and historical IR;

How the concept of “frontier” unites Republicanism and imperialism in some of the early thinkers of IR like Frederick Jackson Turner, William Allen, and Merze Tate.

I was sick as a dog when we recorded this, but it was one of the most generative conversations I’ve ever had on the pod and Robbie is one soulful human being. Hope you enjoy this one!

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Robbie Shilliam, “Republicanism and Imperialism at the Frontier: A Post-Black Lives Matter Archeology of International Relations,” https://robbieshilliam.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/frontier-2.0.pdf.

Epeli Hau’ofa, WE ARE THE OCEAN: SELECTED WORKS (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008).

In this episode, Van sits down with Adom Getachew to talk about W.E.B. Du Bois’s life and Du Bois-ian thought as a prism for making sense of the world, including: The global color line and its limits for understanding IR; Du Bois’s complicated attitude toward violence versus pacifism; strategies for trying to make change as a public intellectual; how he viewed World War I, and how that view changed with time; his blind spots on gender equality and empire—especially imperial Japan; how Du Bois viewed capitalism and Marxism; why the Cold War is the reason I (and probably you) never learned about Du Bois in school.

W.E.B. Du Bois: International Thought (by Adom Getachew and Jennifer Pitts)

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Have you ever wondered about the political economy of movie-making?

Like, why are Hollywood movies globally hegemonic, and why is South Korea its only rival, and why are most foreign countries mere backlots for American studios?

What does it have to do with the Netflix-Hulu-Amazon-Disney+ streaming model?

Why are the WGA and SAG-AFTRA on strike? What kind of solidarities unite American writers and actors with Korean writers and actors?

And what is the future of film?

Some really big questions, and US foreign policy plays a role in answering them, remarkably. I sat down with writer/director/producer/editor Kevin Fox to discuss. This was fun!

Kevin’s epic tweet thread: https://twitter.com/Michigrimk/status/1695209106921947232

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I just gave a talk to a section of the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs—a great group of a couple dozen Gen Z’ers, at a nice little bar in Wellington. What started out as shooting the shit about foreign policy turned into a live show of the podcast.

In this live show, I put three propositions on the table—Un-Diplomatic regulars will be at least somewhat familiar with all these themes: 1) Sino-US rivalry is not a struggle for hegemony or domination; 2) US grand strategy is one of primacy, and the requirements of primacy today conflict with the requirements of peace in Asia and the Pacific; 3) The root-cause of our problems with China is inequality—at multiple levels, but especially within China.

Along the way, we talk about policy thinking as a practitioner versus as an IR scholar; speaking truth to power; job prospects for Gen Z; why New Zealand’s priority ought to be preventing another Gallipoli; and more! Shout out to Tom Preston and Celia McDowell for putting this on.

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This episode doesn’t just have a theme, it has a thesis. Have you wondered how precisely the Pentagon manages to siphon so much taxpayer money year after year? How the military-industrial-congressional complex functions in practice? Why US primacy is so expensive yet perpetually in crisis? This episode with William Hartung and Julia Gledhill is something of a tutorial for understanding Pentagon bloat and corruption—which are deeply intertwined. US defense strategy has been hot garbage for, well, as long as I’ve been alive. It’s never been well conceived, sets impossible standards that it uses to request evermore funds when it fails to meet them, and heightens the very threats it aims to guard against. As we discuss in this episode, a key cause of this strategic ineptitude is Pentagon graft and the ability to buy its way out of the kinds of tradeoffs that would impose discipline on strategy-making.

Bill and Julia’s piece in The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/pentagon-debt-ceiling-bill/

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In this cross-over episode with the Security Dilemma podcast, Van speaks with Patrick Fox and John Allen Gay of the John Quincy Adams Society about a range of issues: dissident thinking and intellectual diversity in foreign policy; how to think about China and deterrence; what’s wrong with a "foreign policy for the middle class”; fissures in the progressive movement on foreign policy; and more! 

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Subscribe to the Security Dilemma Podcast: https://jqas.org/security-dilemma/

John Quincy Adams Society: https://jqas.org

Part II of my conversation with Jonathan Kirshner about his new book, An Unwritten Future: Realism, Uncertainty, and World Politics. Kirshner explains how classical realists think about the “national interest"; distinctions between realist and progressive political economy; what he doesn’t like about the “Thucydides’ Trap,”; the poverty of offensive realism; and how classical realism understands everything from British appeasement of Hitler to the Vietnam War.

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Part I of my two-part conversation with Jonathan Kirshner about his new book, An Unwritten Future: Realism, Uncertainty, and World Politics. Kirshner explains why classical realism is a misunderstood intellectual tradition. We get into: Why realism recruits dead people into their intellectual tradition; what we can learn from Thucydides, and why an armchair understanding of the Peloponnesian War does more harm than good; why realist pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy; why international relations has somewhat lost its way; how we should think about the “national interest"; and distinctions between realist and progressive political economy.

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What's the difference between centered and de-centered international orders? How do small states navigate geopolitics without becoming pawns? What does it look like to have a world in which there is no hegemon, and how is it sustained? And why was 15th century maritime Southeast Asia a different international order than the Sino-centric "tributary system" in what is now Northeast Asia? Dr. Manjeet Pardesi joins the show to share new research that sheds light on all these questions and more. A tour-de-force of historical international relations, what it means to take a relational view of world politics, and small-state strategies in Asia. 

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Manjeet's article in Global Studies Quarterly (open access!): https://academic.oup.com/isagsq/article/2/4/ksac072/6947856

What's wrong with liberal hegemony? What does it mean for New Zealand to have an "independent foreign policy?" Why did New Zealand's Prime Minister recently visit China? And why are the interests of New Zealand's leading dairy supplier far from the same thing as the interests of the nation? In this cross-over episode, Van sits down with the good folks at the 1 of 200 Podcast to discuss an unusual intersection of US foreign policy pathologies with those of New Zealand.

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Listen to the 1 of 200 Podcast: https://www.1of200.nz/podcast

Kyle Church on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KyleDChurch

Branko Marcetic on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BMarchetich

Van sat down with China watcher Carla Freeman (US Institute of Peace) to explore this thing Xi Jinping announced last year called the “Global Security Initiative,” which turned into a larger discussion about how China thinks about security and international order generally. The catalyst was a piece she wrote with Alex Stephenson. We get into: What China’s “relational” thinking about world politics really means in practice; How Chinese security thinking affects the global South; How US choices affects Sino-Russian ties; How Made in China 2025 looks in hindsight; The aspects of international order China likes most; and more!

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Opposition parties carried the day in Thailand's recent multiparty elections on May 14. The Move Forward Party, led by Pita Limjaroenrat, and Phue Thai party of Thaksin Shinawatra's family, won a sizeable majority, with the military's coalition parties losing resoundly. What does the recent election mean for the country's path forward? Will the military's election commission let the opposition form a government, or will it stage another coup like in 2014? Has Thai society finally moved on from the Yellow Shirt-Red Shirt divide that paralyzed the country's politics for the past two decades? Hunter Marston sits down with ANU professor Greg Raymond and University of Sydney professor Aim Sinpeng to discuss Thailand's democratic crossroads.

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