Lawfare Daily: ‘The Rivalry Peril’ with Van Jackson and Michael Brenes

[Intro]

Van Jackson: Orienting yourself in a primacist way toward the world while the world is becoming more multipolar is just setting us up for like an explosion or an implosion, you know? Like we're trying to take a greater share of power in a shrinking world where power is going in the opposite direction. That makes us have to do more aggressive things and take more risks.

Tyler McBrien: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare with Van Jackson, professor of international relations at Victoria University of Wellington and Michael Brenes, associate director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and lecturer in history at Yale University.

Michael Brenes: Yeah, you can keep pursuing competition with the idea that we have to change China's behavior because we don't like what it's doing, but I don't think you gamed out again what the end point of that is and taking stock of the consequences of it, you know, both in human terms, but also in sort of just baseline numbers, economic terms.

Tyler McBrien: Today we're talking about Van and Michael's new book, “The Rivalry Peril: How Great Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy.”

[Main podcast]

So Van and Mike, many of our listeners will be familiar with some of the terms you use in the book, in the subtitle in particular—great power competition, strategic competition—or listeners may think they know what these things mean and their origins. But just so we're all on the same page, I want to do a little scene setting, defining of terms.

So Michael, go to you first. What is great power competition as you use it in the book, as the U.S. foreign policy establishment understands it—if those are the same or different—and similar terms like strategic competition.

Michael Brenes: The ways—so great power competition as a historical phenomenon is different than great power competition as a framework for understanding global affairs, world order, foreign policy today.  And we try to make this distinction in the book, you know, that great power competition as a historical phenomenon has existed, you know, for centuries.

You can go back to the 17th century, 16th century; we, we start there essentially as sort of modern history and look at the ways that empires were formed, you know. The British empire, the French empire, and the two locked over struggle in terms of resources, colonies, etc., you know; throw in the Dutch as well, Spanish for that, you know, the sort of great power competition access to countries and resources that existed for quite some time that, of course, went over, went through evolutions or changes the international system as it changed, empires changed,.

And the way in which great power competition shapes the 20th century, of course, is through the Cold War in particular—talk about World War I, as well, we throw out, we talk a little bit about that—but the Cold War becomes the framing for understanding great power competition today, where the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an ideological struggle that was also a military struggle that was also a political struggle over the quote unquote free world, you know, communism versus democracy or capitalism, capitalistic democracy, liberal democracy in a capitalist system competing with a closed autarkic communist system.

And the idea then was that the history of that moment was that the Soviet Union fell, the United States prevailed in that contest between two great powers, creating a lot of bloodshed and instability in the process, but that idea of the Cold War is what's become the framework for great power competition today.

And so that's the phenomenon that we're attacking in the book. We're not attacking the historical understandings of great power competition. It's more of like great power competition as a framework for understanding the U.S.-China relationship today is bad. And it's bad because for the reasons I just mentioned, which is that it created a lot of instability and violence that policymakers I think have yet to account for. If they have accounted for it, they ignore it in how they think about the future of the U.S./China relationship.

And so great power competition is, to answer your question, is a way of understanding the world, but doing so first and foremost through a U.S. lens and trying to rely upon U.S. power in all the forms that it's expressed—military power, economic power—and the United States as a liberal hegemon, that phenomenon being one where we can, in the eyes of policymakers, create another Cold War or rely upon the same tools that we relied upon in the Cold War to defeat now the, the Chinese.

And that's anachronistic, obviously. It's historically anachronistic and it's also creating a lot of—or it's going to create a lot of—instability and already has in the United States and abroad.

Van Jackson: The thing I would add to that is like, Mike and I kind of mind melded over this project in the first place, because we were watching the, the then nascent Biden administration start to like roll out these ideas about how they were going to do foreign policy, how they were going to justify still pursuing primacy in a world that like obviously no longer accommodated it, you know, and everything really hung on this Cold War metaphor.  Like the, the Jake Sullivans and the Kirk Campbells, they were evoking like a very romanticized version of what the Cold War was.

And the two of us were converging on this, like head scratching, like, what are they talking about? Like the Cold War that we knew sucked. And there's a million, a million reasons for that. You know, like there's no sort of objective reading of history, if you can even think of reading history objectively, like that would, that would lead you to think that the Cold War is something that ought to be sort of invoked or replicated, you know? Like if that's what's going on in our current moment, we have every obligation to stand in the way of it, to prevent it, to foreclose on it, to cut it short, and the Bidenistas does, we're doing very much the opposite.

So that was like, we realized, even though that would make us very unpopular, and I think maybe it has, that's, that, that was the starting point, right.

Tyler McBrien: It’s on a pod. You got an invitation. You're, you're popular.

Michael Brenes: I wasn't ever popular to begin with, so.

Van Jackson: I didn't get in this for the likes.

Tyler McBrien: So I want to build out that, that rosy, flawed vision of the Cold War. Can you build out that picture? What, what are the, the Biden administration, the, you know, anyone who deploys this understanding of the Cold War in to justify great power competition, what is their view of the Cold War? What are the proponents that they claim of great power competition? And then of course we'll get into why that's all wrong.

Michael Brenes: You know, I think, I think it first stems from, as you're kind of alluding to Tyler, it's the, the, the historical memory of this more of the, as Van said, the reality of the Cold War. And it's this idea that, well, we had the containment of the Soviet Union, the, the argument that George Kennan made in 1946, that the United States could contain Communism and could preside over the implosion of the Soviet Union and that would lead to a free and prosperous nation.

I think that's, that's the idea that they have about the Cold War and that the Cold War birthed a unipolar era for American dominance—that was not as stable and peaceful as I think many policymakers want to remember—you know, i.e. the war on terror, but they see the Cold War as a righteous struggle that led to the fall of evil or to the, to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which is, you know, representing an evil empire, to quote Ronald Reagan.

And I think that's a heady, intoxicating view of, of the Cold War that I think is, is very attractive to people who want to understand foreign policy. in the terms that the Biden administration understood it, which is that we're locked in a competition or fight between autocracy and democracy. And that's how President Biden framed it.

And I think you invariably then have to turn to some sort of historical reference point, and the Cold War was a convenient one because it was in the minds of, of people within the Biden administration, even though some people weren't—I mean, they obviously were in office, but they were formed by the memory of it —and they, I mean, Biden himself, you know, was, I think the, was a product of this. And I think that he, he as a policymaker saw himself as sort of carry on the sort of like, you know, Cold War legacy of the United States as a virtuous nation.

And I don't know whether, you know, a different president would have a different vision, but I think that that idea of sort of the United States as a, as a special nation with a special providence, you know, that, and that coming out of the Cold War, I think that just kind of became too intoxicating for, for Biden. And also made, made it easy to understand formulations in simple terms, you know, like a multipolar world can go back to being a bipolar one and the United States can continue doing what it was doing in the wake of the Cold War and freedom will triumph, etc.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, it is remarkable to hear people to this day who should know better referring to the Cold War as bloodless or other terms that are, are just not accurate,

Van Jackson: Heroic, yeah.

Tyler McBrien: And so I guess a way of, of getting at your question toward the latter end of, of the last answer, Mike, is we've been talking about the Biden administration, but I think your book lays out really well that this modern iteration certainly predates the Biden administration.

So Van, where, where do you see this China obsession, threat inflation begin— this idea, start to coalesce that, that China is an existential threat and therefore we need to mobilize the country toward great power competition with it. Where do you, where do you start that story? And it's, it's modern iteration.

Van Jackson: Yeah, I mean, there's three, there's three sort of complimentary ways to explain this and they all fit together like the reality is the combination of these things.

So on one level, you have this brute reality that we cover on our Cold War history chapters as well of the book. You know, the National Security Act of 1947, the American national security state as it exists today—all these agencies and institutions and la de da—hey were designed, optimized for a singular, monolithic, giant, great power rival, you know.

The war on terror in a lot of ways was actually quite uncomfortable for the national security state. Like it was not, the, you know, these institutions that were designed to take on a singular great power had to retool toward chasing individual bad guys in caves and, and that kind of thing, and like, that was an awkward fit. And a lot of the war on terror warriors didn't like it, became alienated, especially when it proved counterproductive or unproductive and were looking to get beyond the war on terror, you know.

So China was just too perfect as the Soviet Union 2.0, that we have all these institutions, a mas-, we have all this power organized within all these particular bureaucratic structures, and we finally have a potential bad guy that matches what we can do.

So there's like kind of a supply side explanation of that perceptions there in a way, right, but there's also the fact that like. Starting with the global financial crisis and the Great Recession as Obama comes into power, you know, that was the death knell or the beginning of the end for neoliberal globalization. So as global growth slowed, stagnated, shrank, the dividends of neoliberal globalization stopped paying off.

And so what we had in the wake of that was both states, both great powers, China and the U.S.—and frankly, China moved first—but both, this is what we're doing now. It's state led capitalism, state driven capitalism, right? The ideology, you know, component of that being economic nationalism, right?

And so the state—if you're a powerful state in a world of low growth—you no longer rely on like these globalization, win-win type narratives. You rely on like an I gotta get mine kind of political mobilization.

So great powers use the power of the state to secure the bag for themselves, for their sectoral interest, for their special interests. And so now then that's, that is why it's useful to think of a great power competition as inter imperial rivalry. Cause it's states mobilizing to grab a greater share for themselves of a shrinking economic pie, even if it's at the expense of, I mean, not just the other great power, but like at the expense of everybody, you know. And that's, that's one way of understanding why it feels like the walls are closing in on this world, even before Trump won, you know.

Then the third way of understanding all of this is that like the missing piece that I think we do a good job addressing in the book that even a lot of like people who recognize inter-imperial competition don't quite get, which is that America and its foreign policy has had this primacist orientation toward the world, a grand strategy of primacy since the end of the Cold War at least.

It's in our strategy documents repeatedly, you know; sometimes we try to talk our way around it, but that primacy, like the ability to have military superiority, the overwhelming concentrations of economic power relative to the rest of the world, to have that be an end and means of policy is insane unless you're in a unipolar world.

If you're the only superpower in the world, you can do that kind of strategy and get away with it. You can do primacy and get away with it. Is it advisable? I would say no, but you could do it. And we did. The problem is we stuck to that even through the Obama years, right? I served in the Obama administration, even through the Trump years, even through the Biden years. Now we're still doing it just by another name, you know?

And the problem with that is that orienting yourself in a primacist way toward the world while the world is becoming more multipolar is just setting us up for like an explosion or an implosion, you know. Like we're trying to take a greater share of power in a shrinking world where power is going in the opposite direction; that makes us have to do more aggressive things and take more risks, you know, yada, yada, yada. The world feels very dangerous all of a sudden.

So those are like the three angles on like how we get here, you know.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, yeah, it's really helpful, especially as a general frame of why great power competition is so comfortable or attractive for the United States national security apparati to to just fall back into or to orient themselves toward.

But I want to drill down on, on the specificity of the China threat and its inflation in in some of your arguments.

So, Mike, maybe I could turn back to you for this. In thinking specifically of of China itself, it seems like the Arguments in your book are that the proponents of great power competition, maybe, maybe look at two ways. One that it's necessary because China is an existential threat, but also because it brings–the pursuit of this rivalry brings its own benefits, which we've already started to break down.

But just taking this first part, how is, is China as a threat portrayed right now for great power competition proponents? And why is it maybe a bit inflated in your estimation?

Michael Brenes: I think the preeminent way that China is being presented right now—it came out in different language than the Biden administration, but certainly coming out of the Trump administration—is that China is an existential threat to freedom that it poses a lasting challenge to the rules-based order or a liberal world order, quote unquote, and that it threatens through its military and economic power, the survival of freedom and democracy.

And that's, I think that's how it's being presented in congressional hearings for Trump appointments now. It's, it's much of the conversation, I think, again, when the Biden administration, again, sort of danced around this, the Biden, you know, China will eat our lunch, quote, unquote, kind of rhetoric is, is implying that China's out to get us, that it's an imperial threat. And this comes out of the work of people like Rush Doshi and others, you know, that China's long game, its grand strategy is to, is to seek world dominance.

And I don't see any—we don't see any evidence of that, you know, that China seeks global dominance. Regional influence, certainly; I think China, you know, wants markets to export its goods, I mean, hence the Belt and Road Initiative. It's, it's acting like a great power does. But that doesn't mean it's an imperial power.

And I think China poses a series of threats, of course, you know, that's like cyber security, you know, the illegal drug trade which Trump has latched on to with the justification for tariffs. There are various threats that China poses—I mean, human rights violations of its Uyghur population, but do these present collectively, do they represent an existential threat to freedom?

No, and that's what we're taking on in the book is sort of the ways in which that China, the way in which the rhetoric has been escalated towards China and the policies that have come out of this rhetoric—protectionist measures, tariffs, export controls, etc.—feeds into Chinese nationalism, which then gets fed back to us as like, Oh my God, that's signs that China seeks imperial dominance.

And there, there begins or maintains the vicious cycle of we, we inflate the China threat. China responds by saying, oh, the United States is. It's much more belligerent nation than they take that and feed that back into their own population as justification for their policies. And then we see that as evidence as, oh, Xi Jinping is, is you know, Stalin 2.0, or he's, you know, Hitler, which, he's been compared to these two individuals.

And that's the, and that is, is going to go, I think—it's just one, I mean, it's just wrong, but two, it foments bad policies and. gives license to the worst actors in our political culture who spread baseless conspiracy theories about China's role in government. You saw this during the TikTok ban, temporary ban TikTok. And I think that's, that's what we're focused on in the book, but there are other, other parts of this too, but the sort of threat inflation doesn't match the—of course, because it's inflated—the reality.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah. One example that always jumps out to me is when China built its first overseas military base and there was shock and, you know, and sort of, you know, proof of, of concept for people you know, who are pushing for great power competition. But if you, if you zoom out of a world map and you see, you know, the entire constellation of U.S. overseas military bases encircling China and in the Pacific, it's, it almost, you know, begs the question of why they didn't build one sooner, or can you blame them because it's, it's you know, threat begetting threat.

So I wanna, I wanna touch on something that seems to be underlying this argument, which is that great power competition is a choice rather than a destiny or an inevitable reaction to facing a threat.

So, first of all, if that's, just want to see if that's fair to say. And then Ben, maybe I could, I could come to you about how you start to propose a change of course. So, if it is a choice to engage in great power competition, what might other choices be and what might the better choices be?

Van Jackson: Yeah, it's totally a choice. I mean, that's why we're making this intervention, I think, because it doesn't have to be this way. And so, we spend the conclusion of the book basically outlining in like a reasonably detailed way an alternative approach to relating to the world and, and a big part of that is relating differently to China.

And so, if we have this matrix of, of issues and concerns that we have in, in world affairs and China is like one slot within that, it's reasonable to have certain concerns about China. You know, human rights, violations military buildups, you know—there's like, there's things there that are like reasonable criticisms to have; almost none of them are unique to China, and we don't apply the standard that we apply of judgment on China and the threat perceptions that we assigned to China—we don't do that when it's basically almost anybody else, you know, the retaking of Hong Kong pales in comparison to the retaking of Kashmir by India.

You know, China is not doing extraterritorial assassinations; India is, yet we're selling billions of dollars of defense weapons to India. You know, the one base versus our 700 bases, you know. Like we start drone warfare and then we freak out when they start selling drones to an enemy of one of our friends. You know, like the hypocrisy.

And like, we view China as this isolated, like bad guy, and so we see them do things that we don't like, and then we don't spend any serious time trying to account for why they do it. We simply attribute it to them doing the bad guy thing. You know, and it's like, well, Xi Jinping's evil. Well, it's the CCP. It's the Communist Party. Suddenly we found the label communist really convenient the last five or six years, but for 40 years before that, we had been trying to avoid saying it. You know what I mean?

So it's like, we choose to look at them and relate to them in this way that tries to kneecap their power and to contain them and to securitize and villainize their influence, as if in world politics, other actors with power are not going to have influence. You know, as if influence were inherently malign and it's like, geez, man, you know, like this is, this is not serious analytically.

So, it's totally a choice. To, to do great power competition or great power rivalry. is to engage in basically a zero-sum framework, another extreme concentration of power in the world system. Is that wise? I mean, no, not historically, you know, why should, why, why do we think this can possibly end well? it's really American exceptionalism. It's like a blind faith in our own goodness, which is not justified, if you look at our track record of foreign policy, you know, even just in recent years alone.

And so right sizing the China threat and diagnosing it correctly and keeping it in proportion and having the analytical humility to understand that, like, you know, international relations is relational; anything that out there that is a problem might well be bound up with choices that we're making back here, you know. We exist in an interactivity and that means that we should be able to affect things out there by making different choices here, you know.

So, at a philosophical level, there has to be room to relate differently and that kind of changes everything that's possible. A lot of the policies that would be cooperative, stabilizing, create mutual prosperity, that would make the world safer. A lot of those policies are impossible within a framework ozero-sumum rivalry. But they become unlocked if you have a kind of detente posture if you relate to them in a way that respects a kind of mutual coexistence, you know.

Tyler McBrien: I want to get to another question, and I will apologize before I do so because I may be, may be falling prey to the bad analysis and speculation.

But what do you say to counterarguments that okay, this is all fine and good if the U.S. starts to engage more productively, shifts away from great power competition; but this is a two way partnership, and, and if the Chinese are not willing to do that as well, then we're suckers or some, some other, you know, realist argument. Or say tomorrow China invades Taiwan and, and there's another or another similar land grab or, or similar event like that. Does your analysis change or, or is this, is this baked in?

Van Jackson: I mean, the thing I would say about Taiwan quickly is like, if you, if you want to prevent war over Taiwan, the way to do that is not to, you know, you don't jingo your way into war prevention. You don't like the, the, the threat—the idea that like perpetual deterrence is what's going to keep China from invading Taiwan is extremely unrealistic, you know.

Like Taiwan, and the, the, the situation between China and Taiwan has not changed dramatically the past 25 years, just objectively on paper. What's changed dramatically since 2017 is the onset of great power rivalry. It's the context of geopolitical competition between the great powers that makes Taiwan more insecure. We, we shifted from detente with China to rivalry with China and overnight Taiwan became more under threat, became more paranoid, rightfully so, about Chinese designs on them, you know, but like the way to deal with that is to distance ourselves from crisis, foreclose on the crisis that would lead to a conflict, you know.

And so that's the way, and like, if you really want to delegitimize China doing a land grab over Taiwan, maybe you don't run a foreign policy that's predicated on land grabs yourself. You know what I mean? Maybe you don't punch holes in the international law regime, you know, like that's—like to destroy the, the edifice of anything that might be called a rules-based order and to spit on it, like we've been doing, is, makes Taiwan more vulnerable. It makes Chinese predation more, basically, acceptable. So, it's like we're, we're harming ourselves if our interest is actually preventing a war over Taiwan.

Michael Brenes: Yeah, I'll just, I'll just add to, to kind of piggyback on that is that, you know, no one in my view or in our view has yet to sort of do a net assessment of like, what, what are the ends of competition? What do we want here? Like, do we want to–

Van Jackson: For what, yeah.

Michael Brenes: For what? I mean, to, to, if, if say, if China invades Taiwan tomorrow, I'm not satisfied with like the people being, I was right, you know, see, you know, you know. What do we get out of that besides our own self satisfaction and maybe an op-ed in the New York Times?

Tyler McBrien: You get to dunk on someone on, on, on X or Twitter or something.

Michael Brenes: Okay, but that's, you know, that, that's an event that's going to lead to 25% unemployment globally, you know, that's going to completely grind, grind supply chains to a halt. And it's going to collapse the world economy and therefore undo whatever rules-based order you have left.

And I think that to me, to Van's point, is sort of the response to people like, well, you know, is this a two, isn't this a two-way choice? Yeah, I mean, obviously, like again, China engages in behavior that we don't like and that, that infringes upon the rights of people globally, you know, in terms of a Belt and Road Initiative.

However, you don't try to change the behaviors of the regime by antagonizing and poking you with a stick, you know, and saying like, hey, stop doing that and just keep jabbing them, and, you know, with the stick and saying, you don't, you don't want to invade Taiwan, do you? You don't want to, you know, to do these, do these measures and then try to arms race them or technology race them into, into submission.

That doesn't work historically. It didn't work during the Cold War. And this goes back to the point about the memory of the Cold War is that, oh, we, this idea that Ronald Reagan, because of his defense buildup put the Soviet Union on a footing where it felt it had to out compete with the United States on technology, and like, oh my God, then we can't do that, and we can't keep up with the Americans and the Soviet system bankrupted itself because of its defense spending.

But that's not historically true. It's not—Gorbachev actually didn't really care all that much about STI. He didn't really care, you know, too much about what was going on. It's, the Soviet economy was imploding since the early ‘80s and the system couldn't sustain itself due to, due to a variety of different factors.

And I think that's, that's kind of, again, the question, do we want to see Xi Jinping's regime collapse to the point that it leads to greater instability, instability in China, compounding the current crises that China has in terms of its youth employment, in terms of its real estate? Do we want to see a collapse of the global, of the Chinese economy in ways that affect the global economy?

I would say, no, I would say it's bad for American workers. I would say it's bad for people around the world. And so, yeah, you can keep pursuing competition with the idea that we have to change China's behavior because we don't like what it's doing, but I don't think you've gamed out again, what the endpoint of that is and taking stock of the consequences of it, you know, both in human terms, but also in sort of just baseline numbers, economic terms.

Van Jackson: Can I two finger his mentioning of what's good for workers here, like separate from whatever you think might be necessary.

Like maybe you've got a diagnosis of China that like, we just don't vibe with that. We don't agree with, you know, you think it's the big bad and that's just correct. Even in that case, nobody can deny that America is like one of the great sick men of the world right now. You know, like American society is in deep, deep doo-doo. Nobody denies that anymore.

And that directly ties to military Keynesianism—what we call national security Keynesianism in the book—this, this distortion, over-reliance of the national economy on the defense industrial complex that sickens us, literally.

Like the first 18 years of the war on terror, the interest alone on our defense spending for that first 18 years was $925 billion. That's money spent on just servicing debt that got thrown down a hole, given, given to Booz Allen Hamilton or whatever, right? That's not for job creation. It's not for wages. It's not welfare. That's just for servicing debt, you know.

Brown University cost of war project—the job multiplier effect for every million dollars spent on the defense industry is lower than the job multiplier effect for that same million dollars spent on any other industry including education and healthcare. You know, military spending is not manpower intensive; it's not labor intensive; it's capital intensive. And so when you pour money into it, you get more stuff, but you don't get more jobs relative to what you would get from investing in other sectors.

And so, when we do this, the guns versus butter tradeoff makes us sicker. And we're seeing that right now, a trillion dollar defense budget—$1.7 trillion over the next 20 years, nuclear modernization. And then at the same time, we're going to be doing $4.5 trillion in tax cuts for oligarchs while we're cutting SNAP benefits, while we're cutting benefits for Medicaid, while we're firing librarians in our communities, you know.

Like we're sick and we're getting sicker and the framework that justifies it is pouring money into the defense establishment. That in the Cold War was bad for the labor movement and weakening the labor movement is kind of the original sin of why we have all of these problems now, and so it all comes back to, I mean, militarism, you know?

Tyler McBrien: Yeah. I mean, thank you for that because this perfectly gets at what I find so compelling about the argument in your book is that great power competition is not only wrong because it doesn't match the reality of the threat or the non-threat, but also because the pursuit of it is in itself damaging to the country.

It even challenged some of my own assumptions about the Cold War, and the so called benefits—however few and far between they may be—which is national cohesion, for example. So, you know, whipping up some sort of national pride because of a common enemy—I mean, we've talked about this currently bipartisan consensus, and I was going to joke that, you know, we finally have one issue where we have bipartisan consensus and you want to jeopardize that, but it gets to your point.

Like, so I want to, want to just focus on that, that second half of the subtitle, of how it weakens democracy. So I don't know, Mike, can you talk a bit about that? How even, even these perhaps more benign—if I can even say that— assumptions that it's, oh, at least it gives us some sort of national pride because we have a common enemy, there's actually a dark side to that, or it's not exactly true.

Michael Brenes: Yeah, well, whereas the, the Cold War, there was an impetus to improve the image of the United States because of the competition with the Soviet Union related to civil rights, for instance.

So the United States going around and saying we are the beacon of freedom around the world and yet having 12 percent of its population disenfranchised, you know in a serious way was impetus for Eisenhower to do something on civil rights; to back up the desegregation of Little Rock High School, for instance; and Kennedy to take measures to support the Civil Rights Act, you know, because he didn't want the images of police dogs attacking peaceful protesters to be broadcast by the Soviet Union and, you know, the United States trying to compete and win for the minds of the Global South.

That phenomenon doesn't exist anymore. There's, there's no interest in sort of the image of the United States being remade because, because of the ways that sort of the neoliberal moment has settled this or squashed it to put it in better terms. Like, well, civil rights is over and like women's rights are here. And then you've got sort of this revanchist right going on and, and, and mobilizing on these terms and feeling like social movements, you know, as they existed in the 60s and 70s are dead and then we don't have a common enemy that to rely upon, and also, it's not as ideological. Like that, that's what's gone.

And so what you get essentially is all the elements of the Cold War, which is that the Chinese are the enemy—or, you know, the Cold War, Communists were the enemy—the Chinese are the enemy. And people saying the Chinese are coming to get us, they're sending their spies—you know, they've infiltrated our minds through TikTok, they're brainwashing us—and you get none of the intended benefits that you got from the Cold War because the political economy has changed, because the image of the nature of the fight has changed, and the image of the United States, again, as a liberal democracy has kind of been settled, quote unquote, in the eyes of these policymakers.

And so as a result, instead of breeding like, you know, national or seeing national incohesion combined with sort of a pluralism of, of, of rights for more people, you just get animosity towards Asian Americans, Chinese Americans, which is what we saw in particular during COVID, where you see increase of hate, hate crimes and anti-Asian attacks; I think it's about 300 percent increase during that time. And now also you get sort of attempts to ban Chinese students from attending American universities.

The idea that, you know, China is, is out to get us is sort of this narrative in the minds of the GOP, where they say, like, you know, the youth are being brainwashed and so they shouldn't, we shouldn't turn on TikTok—and TikTok's, you know, whether it's a social cancer, I don't know, we can debate that—but, you know, it's, it's counterproductive to say as in a multiracial democracy to say like, well, there's, there's a population, there's an enemy within, not just the enemy without, and rely upon that to sort of say, that's going to unite people.

It's obviously not. You saw the Republicans doing this, but there would be points in the book, Democrats doing this as well in, in certain races saying, well, the enemy is China and the China's Chinese are stealing your jobs and trying to rely upon the China shock to, to, and the effects of it to gain electoral prominence without it—again, you know, there's, there's no social benefit to the state to do anything to, to, to counter that.

And I think that's, that's the nature of our politics right now. It's, it's xenophobic and nationalist in many ways. And the, and the China threat or great power competition with China has made it worse.

Tyler McBrien: I want to engage toward the end here now in a little bit of rank political strategizing. Van, I wonder your thoughts on this. You, you do lay out, as you mentioned in great detail another path, a more productive way to engage with China.

How politically viable do you think this is, especially for the Democrats right now? They're in constant fear for a long time of looking soft on China or looking soft on anything really when it comes to foreign policy. And I, I personally think that hamstrings a lot of imagination. It really just boxes them in, but it, you know, that, that's the, the box in which they operate.

So, yeah, I don't know if you've thought through the, you know, how some of these other paths that you set forth could be a viable way for the Democrats to distinguish themselves perhaps from the Trump foreign policy or, or other ways. I don't know if you see any other political openings to achieve some of these things.

Van Jackson: Yeah. I mean, one of the problem, one of several problems with Democrats lately is that they don't even think that they have power. And if you don't even think you exercise power, then you're probably not going to do much. You're probably going to be a worthless opposition. You know, you're probably going to vote unanimously to confirm Marco Rubio as secretary of state for God knows why, you know? And so—I digress.

So I mean, so like what to do, right? So the Democrats, if they think that they're powerless, they're not the path. You know, like I would advise strongly that the Democrats rethink how they do foreign policy, and that might necessarily mean clearing the bench and bringing in a new team of Democratic foreign policy cadre, to be just totally frank.

And that's my world. Like I came from that world. I know all those people, but they've shown themselves to make horrific decisions, judgment the past four years. You know, we needed something radically different from them and they did this unipolar moment redux, like we're all in Aaron Sorkin West Wing just vibing out like everything's back to normal and that just wasn't so, you know? And anybody who in their right mind would have known that. And so I think there's been like a dereliction of duty to be totally honest, to some degree.

So the power game is really on the MAGA side right now. So, you know, we, the, the recommendations we have in the book, the Democrats should take them up. The, there's a, there's a playbook and a narrative there and a set of policy options that Democrats should seize on so that they could be the party of peace, that they could be the party that's against war, which is where they naturally should be, and they've been co-opted in a way that they deny, that they repudiate

And I think, I think it costs them the 2024 election, you know? And so they need to find that anti-war energy again. They need to remember what it was that got Obama elected in the first place, right? And that means opposing militarism in all of its forms and Trump is a militarist. So like there's a strong basis to make that case and we give it, we give it language and expression and policy guidance, you know what I mean?

And it starts with establishing a detente with China, relating to them in a way that doesn't involve jingoism, but involves military restraint, mutual coexistence, and working for the interests of the global South, and the global working classes, which means not trying to pit our workers against their workers and vice versa, you know.

But all of that is a little bit like that's me wishing the Democrats be different than they actually are, you know? And so if the Republicans are the only game in town, there is a narrow bankshot pathway to make a slightly better situation here, which is that Trump has talked big, a big game about 50 percent budget cuts to the Defense, you know, to the Pentagon.

And it's a joke, obviously, like it's not going to happen, but he's, he was doing it in relation to Russia and China. And he's like, I want to do arms control with all three of them, we don't need all these nukes, we want to cut the defense budget by half. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. That is the way, you know what I mean?

So my advice is for MAGA heads—who are probably not listening to this—to really do military cuts, just like Trump talked about. But not just do them willy-nilly Hegseth style—do them in coordination with China, strategically as a signal of a desire to relate differently as a desire to like illicit reciprocal restraint so that we can demilitarize the Asian arms race, you know what I mean? And so have that be a material basis for a new detente with China.

But the way that we're going, we're just doing whatever cuts we feel like. The Pentagon is like, well, the F-35s now an albatross, so we're going to cut that. Well, what if you packaged stuff like that as a proposition to China in hopes of boxing their military capabilities and to have a, have a dialogue about that, you know what I mean? Used to be called arms control. And Trump says he's for it. So let's go. Let's go.

Michael Brenes: Van's absolutely right. I agree with him.

Also, the ways in which we get to a foreign policy is to rethink domestic policy. It's like there needs to be a coalition the Democrats can, can create out of the complete disaster of the 2024 election that wins people on domestic policy, first and foremost, and then we can think about foreign policy, which I think would align with some of the things that domestically we want to change you know, if we see the foreign policy that Van and I discuss, and that Van just articulated.

And the Democrats are not thinking in these terms, they're not thinking in coalitional terms at the moment, at least from my perspective, as Van said. I think—like there's Hakeem Jeffries going on national television saying, well, we're the minority party, what do you want from us? People aren't inspired by that. What can we do?

It's like, it's like the Simpsons meme. Like we've, we're all, we're all out of ideas and we tried nothing, you know, and like, and it's, and it's like, well, then what, what hope do you give people? Like people want to know that they're being taken care of, that they're not going to have to suffer, that their children aren't going to suffer. Like they want, they want good jobs. They want good homes.

And then that—taking care of them—allows us to say, oh, by the way, because we are the most prosperous nation in the world, we have, you know, we're a liberal hegemon, we can also think creatively about taking on climate change, which is an existential crisis is going to affect people around the world and you as well.

But, you know, that, that kind of foreign policy that we'd like to see—taking on true existential crises as opposed to fictitious ones or hyperbolized ones—is, is I think only going to get us there—we're not going to get us there if we have a better class of politics and a better or a better class of politician from which a domestic framework can only materialize from a new coalition.

And that takes—certain leaders in the Democratic party who I think are, you know, they're out there, doing good things; there are a handful of them. But we, but if they want to win, they want to win elections, if they want to, if they want to have power in just those terms, I think that's how I would think about this, and then we can sort of get to the larger, big picture of stuff that we envision.

Van Jackson: Just, you've messed up if you've somehow let Trump own the peace lane, the anti-war lane. Like that's such a hypocrisy and such a joke. And the fact that that's what's going on means that you have messed up. And I don't think there's been any attempts to reckon with that by party elite.

Tyler McBrien: Well, we've given a lot for the Democrats to take up. We've even given some things for the Republicans to take up. I'll end here with a final word from each of you. Is there anything else you wanted to mention in the book, anything I failed in my duties of host to ask you.

Mike, we can go to you first and then Van, we can close it out with you.

Michael Brenes: You know, I mean, I think this is like, we tried to keep the book in the past, you know, in the sense of like, we were, you know, in the late stages of the book, we're like, oh, we should frame the Biden administration in the past tense, you know, whether he wins or not, because, you know, this is what he's done over the past four years.

And I think I, you know, I think what we, what we realized, particularly in the first couple weeks of the Trump administration is that like how things would be upended in a certain way, but yet not. And sort of making sense of this moment —like what, what the kind of what-ifs, game out kind of like what if Trump wins, kind of thing like what happens—as much as I kind of resist that kind of analysis I think there's a ways in which This is why we're doing like this kind of interviews like there's a way in which we can use our analysis to kind of Frame this moment has been kind of kind of kind of said that you know, whatever Trump is doing You know, going back to the 19th century, whatever people say he's doing is existing within a framework of competition and great power competition that he's, that we bestowed to him.

And I think that's kind of the analysis that I wish was in the book, but since we're on this podcast, we're, I'm making it now to you.

But other than that, I thought, I think it's a great book. I think we're brilliant people and, you know, everyone should buy it, but I don't know, Van, what do you.

Tyler McBrien: Van, Counterpoint or bring us home.

Van Jackson: No. So we, we end with an epigraph and the conclusion from Eric Hobsbawm and I'm going to butcher it, but it's something to the effect of like, you know, the urgent task. And he's writing in the George H. George W. Bush years, right, but he's like, the urgent task is to restore sanity or rationality to American foreign policy. Like there's no more urgent task in the world than that because of all the hells that get unleashed by a foreign policy of illegal wars and militarism, by the unchecked, you know, by the dominant power in the system.

And that still is the most urgent task. And there's a way in which like everything else is downstream of that. Like our foreign policy is out of control; it's not rational. It's worse than even, more predatory now. And we've got to bridle that. We've got to bridle the imperial presidency. We had a chance to do it under Biden; we didn't, we made it worse. And now Trump is, you know, drunk at the wheel.

So like that remains the task, you know, and and if we get to have another election, hopefully we'll, we'll think about relating to the world differently.

Tyler McBrien: Well, that seems like a perfect rallying cry to end on. Van, Mike, thank you so much for joining me. The book is “The Rivalry Peril: How Great Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy.” Thanks again, appreciate it.

Van Jackson: Thank you.

Michael Brenes: Thanks. Pleasure.

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