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Michael Brenes and Van Jackson on Why U.S.-China Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy

Sinica Podcast

Fri Jan 02 2026

Summary

Sinica Podcast Episode Summary

Episode: Michael Brenes and Van Jackson on Why U.S.-China Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy
Host: Kaiser Kuo
Guests: Michael Brenes (Yale University), Van Jackson (Victoria University of Wellington)
Date: January 2, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode explores the central thesis of the new book, The Rivalry: How Great Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy, authored by Michael Brenes and Van Jackson. Host Kaiser Kuo guides a discussion that interrogates the harms caused by the US-China rivalry frame—both to American democracy and global peace—and challenges the conventional wisdom that great power competition is necessary or beneficial. The conversation traverses the book’s genesis, the limitations of Cold War analogies, consequences of securitization, and what a different US-China grand strategy could (and should) look like.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Genesis of the Book and Collaborative Approach

Book Origins:
- Sparked by mutual concern over the Biden administration’s embrace of Cold War liberalism and great power competition framing (“link China to domestic prosperity” as done with the Soviet Union; [06:10]).
- Initial collaboration began after Van Jackson praised Brenes’s earlier work critiquing Cold War liberalism, followed by a “mini-viral” Foreign Affairs essay in summer 2022 ([07:27]).
Interdisciplinary Complementarity:
- Van Jackson: International Relations (IR), security, policy practitioner, East Asia/Korea expertise.
- Michael Brenes: Cold War historian, deep knowledge of military Keynesianism and US grand strategy.
- This blend of perspectives enabled a uniquely thorough and critical lens ([11:26]).

2. Challenges of the Left’s Perspective on China

Complications for US Progressives:
- China, “nominally socialist but deeply unequal,” is difficult for the American left to position clearly ([12:36]).
- The need to move beyond simplistic “good guy/bad guy” or purely moralistic frames and adopt a more nuanced, political-economic and relational systems approach ([15:29]; [16:46]).
Critique of Washington Discourse:
- China-bashing often serves as a nationalist project in both parties—and especially so under the widely cited but misapplied Klein and Pettis framework, which the authors critique ([15:09]).

3. How ‘Great Power Competition’ Became Ideology

Mechanisms Entrenching the Rivalry Frame:
- Pivot from War on Terror, especially toward the end of the Obama administration ([22:30]).
- “Great power competition” became an axiom in the DC policy world—first through Pentagon strategy docs, then as a bipartisan consensus ([22:04]; [25:02]).
- Changing rhetoric was driven by a need to justify military budgets and stimulate “national security Keynesianism” (defense-driven economic stimulus; [03:02]); xenophobic elements helped mobilize support ([28:15]; [29:37]).
Memorable Quote (Van Jackson):

"The national security state decided early in the Obama administration to do the military buildup. But at some point you have to start letting that rhetoric shift toward things like great power competition, you know, and... you have to have the xenophobia kind of element at some point in order to mobilize resources to do military buildup." ([27:14])

4. Debunking Cold War Myths

Historical Misrememberings with Contemporary Consequence:
1. The “long peace” myth—obscures the extreme violence and proxy conflicts, especially in Asia ([28:55]).
2. The ‘containment works’ narrative—the idea that US pressure brought down the Soviet Union ignores the primacy of internal Soviet dynamics and the dangerous mismatch when applied to China today ([30:47]).
Quote (Michael Brenes):

"The Cold War was incredibly violent ... to a lie the deaths of millions and say, well, this was simply a long peace ... discounts the violence inherent to great power competition." ([29:06])

5. Security Dilemma & the Boomerang of Threat Inflation

Security Dilemma Framing:
- Both US and China respond to perceived threats by augmenting security, which creates mutual escalation and worsens the situation—‘carrots, not sticks’ are what’s needed, but the rivalry framework does the opposite ([33:27]; [36:01]).
- Example: US investments in nuclear modernization provoked Chinese nuclear expansion, which is then cited in DC as proof of malign intent ([36:01]).
Quote (Van Jackson):

"...by everybody just trying to secure themselves, they're making everybody worse off. Right. That's the dilemma." ([33:36])

6. Critique of National Security Keynesianism

Key Criticism:
- Defense spending is “really capital intensive,” poor at job creation, and creates a narrow set of beneficiaries rather than broad prosperity ([39:55]).
- Government funding justified by rivalry politics could have greater economic and social returns if diverted to civilian R&D, infrastructure, climate, and public health.
Quote (Kaiser Kuo):

"It's like a shitty Keynesian multiplier effect." ([41:16])
Political Viability:
- While elite support for high defense spending remains, the US working class is increasingly skeptical; populist energy may exist for redirecting priorities, but elites in both major parties sustain the status quo ([39:55]; [41:16]).

7. Rivalry Weakens Democracy

Consequence of Securitization:
- Domestic dissent becomes suspect; anti-Asian hate and new McCarthyism spike (e.g., the China Initiative, TikTok moral panic; [03:02]; [42:53]).
Feedback Loop:
- Erosion of faith in democratic institutions—leads to search for external rivals; in turn, the rivalry frame further erodes democracy ([44:38]).
Path Forward:
- Frame domestic priorities outside of a “China threat” lens: focus on affordability, inclusion, and social welfare to build broad democratic coalitions ([44:38]; [47:24]).

8. Coalitions for Restraint and a New Narrative

Building a Restraint-Oriented Coalition:
- Debunking myth that foreign threats “bring us together”—data shows nationalism amid high inequity and polarization deepens division, not cohesion ([49:28]).
- Need for cross-partisan, non-obvious alliances focused on material interests and less-militarized policy ([48:09]).
The Master Narrative:
- Reject “great power competition” as a guiding frame.
- Jackson’s alternative: “Geopolitics of peace” anchored in a new US-China détente ([53:27]).
- Three pillars:
  1. War prevention over preparation
  2. Security dilemma sensibility/strategic empathy
  3. Associative balancing—not zero-sum, but stability through “accommodation, restraint, and careful statecraft” ([55:29]).
  - Quote (Jackson):
    
    "...another tradition of power balancing that is what you would consider like antagonistic ... but there's another tradition ... which is associative balancing, which is about achieving a balance of power through accommodation and restraint ..." ([55:29])
The Reality of Multipolarity:
- Washington must accept multipolarity and abandon the pursuit of primacy ([57:17]).

9. Shifting Political Tides

Recent Polling & Public Attitude:
- Polls suggest the public is not as on-board with the “China is the enemy” chorus as elites are ([51:44]).
- The idea of great power competition is largely “an elite project”—foreign to everyday Americans ([52:55]).
- Notable recent public and elite rhetoric hints at a possible shift toward less animosity ([50:26]).

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On security dilemma:
"By everybody just trying to secure themselves, they're making everybody worse off. That's the dilemma."
— Van Jackson ([33:36])
On Cold War myth-making:
"The Cold War was incredibly violent ... to a lie the deaths of millions and say, well, this was simply a long peace ... discounts the violence inherent to great power competition."
— Michael Brenes ([29:06])
On ‘bad guy logic’ of rivalry politics:
"The way the bad guy valence stuff is just not especially productive. And if you understand IR... start thinking at like a systems level... solutions are not going to be nationalist in their orientation."
— Van Jackson ([16:46])
On National Security Keynesianism:
"It's like a shitty Keynesian multiplier effect."
— Kaiser Kuo ([41:16])
On elite consensus:
"Great power competition is such a, even that that phrase itself is so foreign to normal people."
— Van Jackson ([52:56])

Timestamps for Important Segments

[05:47] — Origins of the book and intellectual collaboration
[13:53] — The American left’s China conundrum and being “anti-nationalist” in approach
[22:04] — How “great power competition” became an ideology
[28:50] — Cold War analogies: what policymakers get wrong
[33:18] — Security dilemma and the boomerang of threat inflation
[39:55] — National security Keynesianism critique, effects on jobs and democracy
[44:38] — How rivalry undermines democracy; possibilities for reframing
[48:09] — Building coalitions for restraint
[53:27] — Proposing a “geopolitics of peace”—the alternative narrative
[55:29] — Associative balancing explained

Recommendations (from the End of the Episode)

Van Jackson:
The Long 20th Century by Giovanni Arrighi — A world-systems analysis on how crises of capitalism fuel great power competition. ([58:27])
Michael Brenes:
The World of the Cold War, 1945-1991 by Vladislav Zubok — A broad survey emphasizing the economic drivers behind the Cold War. ([59:21])
Kaiser Kuo:
Pluribus (TV show, Apple TV+) — Explores the end of Western liberal individualism with deep political-philosophical subtext. ([60:45])

Concluding Tone & Takeaways

The episode is critical, rigorously analytical, and self-aware—challenging prevailing Washington wisdom but also pointing to ways restraint, systems-thinking, and a focus on shared material interests could yield a less militarized, more democratic, and more peaceful future. The personal tone and interplay between academic insight and real-world experience make for a rich, accessible conversation for any audience seeking to understand the dangers (and alternatives) to the “great power competition” frame.

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Transcript

A (0:00)

Foreign.

B (0:09)

Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, a weekly discussion in China. In this program we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics and society. Join me each week for in depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Goal coming to you this week from New Haven, Connecticut from Yale University. Sinica is supported this year by the center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a National Resource center for the Study of East Asia. The Seneca Podcast will remain free as always, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I'm doing with the show and with my newsletter, please consider lending your support institutionally. I am in need of new institutional funding. You can reach me@cinecopodmail.com listeners. For your part, you can support my work by becoming a paying subscriber@senecapodcast.com you will enjoy, in addition to the show itself, the complete transcript of the show essays from me, as well as writings and podcasts from some of your favorite China focused columnists and commentators. You know who they are. The knowledge, of course, that you are helping me do what I honestly believe is important work. So, so check out the page, see what's on offer. Consider helping me out Today we are talking about a book that is, I think, first and foremost, well, it's about America, about the state of American democracy, its political imagination, its working people. The book is the Rivalry, How Great Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy. And the authors are Van Jackson and Michael Brennis, and I'm delighted to actually have them both here today. Their argument is that the framing of the US China relationship as the geopolitical rivalry has become more than just foreign policy orientation. It's become a kind of domestic political project. It's one that reshapes budgets, norms and coalitions in ways that actually actively harm America. American democracy, American people. Rivalry narrows the horizon of political possibility. It makes dissent quite suspect. It encourages the kind of McCarthyism, the Neo McCarthyism that we saw with the China Initiative, the profiling of not just Chinese Americans like me, but of anyone with ties to China also like me. It produces the kind of anti aapi hate that we saw spike during the COVID pandemic. It redirects public investment away from social welfare, away from productive industrial policy, away from public health, away from climate mitigation, away from education and into things like the defense sector where your spending is, you know, it's politically frictionless even when it is economically inefficient. This is what the authors call national security, Keynesianism. It's a word which I have now adopted as part of my vocabulary. I deployed it, in fact, earlier this afternoon. It's this idea that defense spending is going to create economic stimulus and job creation because everything else is politically contested and you can't get it through. But the people who lose most in this arrangement, as the authors argue, are working Americans whose community needs real investment, whose living standards are stagnating, and who are, you know, given instead a story about foreign threat to explain all their hardship. They also put forth their own vision for what a new American grand strategy could look like, confronting, in a way that I found really admirably direct, the fact that America is just addicted to primacy. So joining me today on Seneca are the book's co authors. Michael Brennis is interim director of the Brady Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and at Yale here. We met earlier this year at a conference in Providence at a conference that was actually on defusing the US Chinese military rivalry. Mike gave a fantastic presentation about the book and I grabbed him right afterward over drinks and said, you got to come on the show. Mike, thanks so much for having me here at Yale and welcome to cica.

C (25:02)

Yeah, I mean this is my, I mean obviously I cosign all of that. The two elements that I would like draw out further. One is that starting in 2010 we have this US defense strategy document called the Quadrennial Defense Review, the QDR. It doesn't name China specific. This is when we are thick in the war on terror. You know, it's all about like Afghanistan stabilization and blah blah, blah. In that strategy document which was very present war focused, not future war focused. It made this carve out where it didn't name China specifically, but it, it said that like the emerging threat is this thing called a 2 AD Anti Access Area denial sure, sure. Everybody understood that this was actually like wink and nod about China. Right? But we were so. We were in such a sort of collaborative, mutual necessity, let's save the global economy mode with China. We were still in like the detente framework, more or less, that you couldn't just like name China as the bad guy at that point publicly. And. But what was happening internally inside the Pentagon at that time was this recognition. And this was where my first sort of, you know, lights started going on, was the recognition that, like, the rise of China in a world of like American unipolarity and primacy necessarily was a shift in the balance of power. A shift in the balance of power invalidates primacy because a primacy strategy is predicated on a unipolar distribution of power. Therefore, the rise of China is a threat for our theory of security, basically. And so we need to do something about this. So the Pentagon started really retooling, I mean, almost immediately from 2010 to focus on quietly shifting the balance of power. Ben Rhodes called this like, they want to get America another 50 years as world leader. But in the Pentagon, that translated into like maximal concentration of power, military primacy. And the way they measured military primacy was defeating China in a cross strait scenario, which is a few dozen miles away from the Chinese mainland. So it's like an impossible geography, to say nothing of like the PLA's capabilities and all of this. So it's this impossible standard for military primacy. And that became the benchmark for everything the Pentagon started to do from that point onward. And the thing about building military power is you can't do it indefinitely unless you start shaking the Jingo cup. Unless you start, unless you start making appeals to nationalism and bad guy ism, you have to have the xenophobia kind of element at some point in order to mobilize resources to do military buildup. So the, the national security state decided early in the Obama administration to do the military buildup. But at some point you have to start letting that rhetoric shift toward things like great power competition, you know, and.

C (33:36)

Right, yeah, yeah. I mean, for people who aren't familiar, it's a situation where two actors find themselves trying to only provide security for themselves, but tragically do it in such a way that it's, it leads the other side to perceive those security measures as coming at their expense. And so then they in turn try to secure themselves, and that comes at your expense. So by everybody just trying to secure themselves, they're making everybody worse off. Right. That's the dilemma. And the reason why it matters is because if you diagnose a security dilemma in the IR theory sense, the implication is that you resolve it best through carrots, not Sticks. Right. And so because you're dealing with two actors who have, at a root level, defensive intentions. And so our assessment is that, I mean, and I think from. To speak of China, I think this is true. And at the time of writing, we also thought this was true of the U.S. america is, like, wildly jingoistic increasingly. I mean, we're. We're a violent, violent country. And so, like, not everyone in America actually does have defensive intentions. Not everybody in America wants to avoid war with China. You know what I mean? Like, there are some who think it's inevitable, which is the same as saying, you want it, you know, and so, like, America's a bit of a mixed bag, but let's say, and for the purposes of analysis, it's just a security dilemma. Both sides have defensive intentions. Okay? If that's the case, then we're talking about a world of statecraft that should look like carrots over sticks. Accommodation, compromise, positive inducements, not negative inducements. Sidestep, coercion, do not arms race, blah, blah, blah. That's the toolkit we should be focusing on. And yet great power competition tells us to do the opposite on every single front. And that's a problem. You know, and one aspect of this, to get to your example, request, you know, the nuclear side of all of this, you know, the most horrific dimension of military competition is the nukes. America, starting in the Obama administration, incidentally, began this process of investing $1.7 trillion over 30 years in nuclear modernization.

A (44:38)

Yeah, I mean, I think. I think kind of Van alluded to this, some of this, but we saw some of this last Tuesday with the elections. So sort of the framing around affordability and the framing of issues outside of a securitized framework, you know, I think that's something that the Biden administration, and this goes to a larger point about great power competition, but the Biden administration chose to do by. By pointing to China as the way to get legislation through Congress. You know, that build back better. If you first look at it, it's an expansion of the welfare state akin to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. There's some stuff in there in universal childcare. There's things in there about creating jobs for Americans without college degrees. It's a pretty big expansion of the welfare system in a visionary sense. But then it runs into Joe Manchin and it runs into Kirsten Sinema, and not to mention the GOP opposition, and they pivot to China saying, well, this is. If we don't get the ira, if we don't get chips, then we can't successfully out compete China and therefore you're putting the, the United States position where our national security is weakened. And so the national security argument is, is a choice but, and it's a convenient one. But then to your point then it doesn't actually support the broader democratic purpose and intentions of, of, of the United States in terms of supporting all of its people. Right. Because economically it benefits a few, but also politically it becomes a cudgel that too often people use to say, well, if you're not sufficiently hawkish on China, therefore you're a threat to the United States or you're, you're, you know, if you're, if you're allowing Chinese immigrants or Chinese students to come to the United States, there's infiltrating our government or infiltrating our universities. And this is, you know, a threat to very American, to American pluralism, a foundational like sort of tenant, as you were saying earlier in class, sort of like the. It's both eroding democracy and we talk about this in the book in economic terms but also political terms. It yes, feeds xenophobia and jingoism and anti Asian attacks which spiked during COVID But it also isn't a good long term strategy for building a robust, healthy democracy, both again in a social democracy sense, but also in the political sense of like sustaining coalitions. And I think the alternative to this is you see this in the affordability crisis, framing things outside of a China threat. And actually you can get more done, you can build more bigger coalitions that include people who have been left out of the democratic fold for the past 30, 40 years, particularly working class people.