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

Summary

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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

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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.

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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]).

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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])

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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

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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])

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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]

Foreign.

[B]

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 [e-mail] listeners. For your part, you can support my work by becoming a paying [e-mail] 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.

[A]

Oh, it's a pleasure, Kaiser. And thanks for having me. It's a longtime fan. First time, first, first time guest.

[B]

Thanks, man. Also joining me from basically as far away as physically possible on this planet is Van Jackson. Van is senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington and the prolific author of many, many great articles, not just on his substack, which is called the undiplomatic substack un-dialatic.com but in many publications, including Foreign Affairs. He is a podcaster himself who is a regular host at the Undiplomatic Podcast, which you should definitely check out. He's also the author of several really good books, including Grand Strategies of the Left and a book I really enjoyed, the Pacific Power Paradox. I don't know why I never had you on the show to talk about that book. That was great, but this will have to do. Van, welcome to Seneca. You are both long overdue.

[C]

I appreciate it, man. It's amazing that we've only just now connected and your summary of the rivalry peril is like so complete that I don't know if we have anything to say.

[B]

Okay, well, we'll just wrap it up here.

[A]

Thanks.

[B]

Thanks for coming on. I'll talk about. Okay. I, I do have lots of Questions to ask you that I didn't touch on. Maybe first, I want to start with the genesis of the book itself, how this came to be. You guys come from very, very different disciplinary homes than you're an IR guy, security studies. Mike, you're an historian. You've worked a lot on American grant strategy. What was the moment or the conversation where you guys realized you needed to write this book together? I mean, was there a specific policy development or rhetorical turn? This was during the Biden administration, so some perfidy of the Bible administration that made you guys think, we have to write something now.

[A]

So I remember. So this was my. My book. My first book came out in October of 2020. And Van generously was writing for this, I think, Ducko Minerva blog. And he recommended my book as like, one of the best reads of 2020, which is still very generous of him to do that. And I just sent him a note saying, hey, thanks so much. I appreciate it, and longtime fan, and maybe someday we can think about working together. And this was in the middle of the pandemic. So, yeah, nothing but time and nothing but time in my house. And so he said, yeah, that'd be great. Thanks again for the book. And months went by. Biden was elected at that point. We saw Biden's foreign and domestic policy develop over 2021. And then that, for some reason, led us to go back to one another. I think maybe Van reached out to me. I reached out to Van. I'm not quite remember, not quite sure who initiated it, but the conversation, I believe, was like, oh, this looks like kind of a version of, like, Cold War liberalism. This looks like Biden's coming to trying to do something that the Democrats tried to do in the early Cold War years, which is link China to, like, the democrats of old did. Link the Soviet Union to domestic prosperity. Link China to domestic prosperity. Now maybe this can be an opportunity to renew, rejuvenate American democracy. And Van had started kicking around some ideas along these lines. I, as a historian, was coming at this. As you know, as a historian, Van was coming at this, I think, from sort of an IR perspective. But I'll let him chime in on that front. And we put our heads together and came up with this piece for Foreign affairs, which we published in the summer of 2022.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

And I think Foreign affairs gave it the title of so Great Power, Competition is bad for Democracy, or something like that. And then that kind of. I don't know what. What Van would say, but it kind of went Miniviral in the foreign affairs space, you know, elite.

[C]

Elite viral.

[A]

Elite viral, yeah. Uh, and. And that led us to sort of say, hey, me, that maybe there's something more here. And then Yale University Press jumped on board a book, and then we collaborated and, and wrote the book, which came out in, in January of this year.

[B]

Fantastic. I want to talk to you guys about how you approached writing together. And maybe what we can do here is first, Van, you tell me in your own words what you think Mike's major contributions were, and then maybe we can turn tables and have Mike you say what you think Van's major contributions were. I mean, I can't even imagine what it's like to write a book with somebody else. Or for that matter, to write a book. I haven't done that yet either. So, Van, you start, man.

[A]

Sure, sure.

[C]

So the part that Mike had like not fully sussed out in what he was just saying was the concerns about Cold War liberalism. I think to some people you mentioned that phrase and implicitly Mike understands that as like a critical label, not a good thing. You know what I mean? And he had written this thing co authored with Danny Steinmetz Jenkins, I think, in like 2021. And it was one of the most refreshing things I had ever read. Critiquing so much that was wrong with Cold War liberalism, as in military Keynesianism and the, you know, diverting from the welfare state to fund national security and like this inversion of a lot of the Washington convent, conventional wisdoms about Cold War liberalism as, as being the great and the good and the thing that like, rejuvenated us and the facts is just not compatible with that. And so Mike's critique of Cold War liberalism was like, lodged in my head. And so as we saw the Biden administration, Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi people, people who were from my old social circle, by the way. There's a longer conversation there.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You worked in the Obama Pentagon, right?

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I. It was before I had a kind of critical consciousness about, about how the world works, but I was part of their social milieu, which made me one of the pioneers of like China hawkery. In fact, in. In Washington, before I had a. Before I realized that was not the right path. But basically like, those guys latched onto hard. This notion of Cold War liberalism as everything. It was like the thing that was going to save us on so many levels. And it was the thing that Democrats thought they could use to out hoc Republicans on China.

[B]

Right.

[C]

And like, we. Because it invoked Cold War Liberalism. We were like, this is not the way. This is bad. And it's. We're swimming upstream by challenging the premise. But challenging the premise seemed like an essential thing to do. And that's how that Foreign affairs piece came out. Mike knows my point was that he knows Cold War history exceedingly well. And as a critique of Cold War liberalism and trying to do Cold War 2.0, who better as a partner in crime than this historian who knows that history inside and out, you know, so it's like I'm bringing the kind of IR theoretical lens and geopolitical reasoning. And, you know, I think I. I have a background as a policy practitioner, and what I lacked was some of that historical context that is like, crucial to making sense of why this is so perilous, you know?

[B]

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Hey, so, I mean, I'm gonna have to ask you about your Road to Damascus conversion, another time away from China hawkery. But let's, let's, let's do the other side of this equation. And, and Mike, tell me what you thought Van's major contributions to the work were.

[A]

Yeah, I think. I think Van's contributions on the IR front and particularly on Korea and sort of East Asia, was just something that I did not have. I don't have a background in sort of regional IR history or theory. I don't have a. I don't do IR studies. I'm not a political scientist, I'm a historian. I think we both work with qualitative methods, so that, that I think helped a lot. But at the same time, I'm not well versed in policy and contemporary issues related to what's now called the Indo Pacific. And I think that, you know, Van's book on. On Trump and Kim and his work on Korea and provided that grounding for the Theory of China chapter and a lot of other things that came about. Our analysis of sort of like, what is the state of the world really as opposed to how Washington sees the world. And that's kind of what we're were trying to get at in the book is like, what really is our analysis of the moment we're in? What does U.S. china, quote, unquote, competition mean and how do we transcend it? And I think Van. Van's just probably, you know, in my view, the best person to, to comment on that stuff.

[B]

Yeah, you guys had high degree of complementarity and it, it, it turned into a really lovely, lovely book. Before we get into the book's actual argument, which I've only really outlined and and you know, we can plunged into it. The argument is made so meticulously. I mean, that's what I really like about it is you really kind of steel man it well and you think through all the possible permutations of it. I thought it was just masterfully done. But I want to ask you about something that sits underneath that argument. You're both writing from what I'd call a progressive or democratic socialist perspective. Even you guys care very deeply about American working class people, about democracy, about challenging militarism and American imperialism and China presents a real puzzle, I think, for the American left. I mean it's nominally socialist, but it's very deeply unequal, a very high Gini coefficient. It's championed by some anti imperialists, understandably as a counterweight to American hegemony. But it's accused by others of its own forms of settler colonialism, of great Han chauvinism. How did you guys navigate that tension? Did you come to this project already aligned on how you thought about China from a distinctly left perspective, or was that something you guys had to hash out?

[C]

I mean, from what I recall, we kind of pieced it together and the, the book that loomed large in the context of like progressive China policy conversations in this early 2000 and 20s period was the Klein and Pettis crap. Trade wars or class wars. That's what it's called. Yeah, yeah. No, there's so like we, I mean we cite as, you know, like we cite that book several times in this book and there's, I personally find like something valuable in their argument that they took in the wrong direction. Right. This, this notion of imbalances is, is true on one level. And it's true that historically China's path to development was export led and it pushed surplus capital into the American market. And this had deleterious effects on like asset price inflation in the US we can't afford homes and this kind of thing. There's, there's, there are some of these dynamics that are true and that producing for export means that you're producing quote unquote over capacity relative to domestic demand. What's not true is that any of that should be necessarily scandalous.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Or, or that what if there's an imbalance regarding one country, it means there's an obverse imbalance for another country. And so what they did was they took this notion of like overcapacity and unbalance in China's economic growth and then.

[B]

They like, they use this moral valence.

[C]

Yes, yes. And it was basically like a kind of nationalist chauvinism, critique of China. And so this is what happens when you d like international relations is relational, but their view of China's imbalances was not relational. And so like a lot of our, our critique and our theory of China is built around understanding that the US and China are both making choices about political economy, but also about military in, in the context of their relations with each other. And so it's impossible to be like, that's the bad guy. Or I mean, we spare no criticism of the U.S. obviously it's like heavily a critique of the U.S. but it's also not enough to be like America's the one that's all messed up here or China's the way the bad guy valence stuff is just not especially productive. And if you understand IR in the relational way that it's supposed to be understood, you start thinking at like a systems level, if you will. And that means the solutions are not going to be, you know, nationalist in their orientation. They're going to be, they need to be system level type solutions.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mike, did you want to add anything to that?

[A]

No, I think that's, that's absolutely right. I think the only thing that I would add is that I think we would have liked to. I mean, maybe I won't throw a van in this, but I wish that we encountered like Kyle Chan and like Lizzy Lee and like, like Adam Tooze's like theory of like China sort of like before we wrote the book. Because I think to Van's point is that it's just, it was just far too simplistic and the American conversation on China is just so parochial that we were trying to say like, these are two great powers who are shaping the international system and you can't put a good guy, bad guy, moralistic bent to this. Like, let's look at this in broader international terms, both in historical and contemporary, but let's look at it particularly through the lens of political economy and like how, how China is developing as a great power and what, what models of development it's using and then the way that political economy is shaping the world within and outside of China. And then that would be, I think, some really interesting conclusions. But we are, I think we're, you know, again, Vin can disagree with me or not, but I think we are focused predominantly on the security question of like why Americans are so obsessed with China as a bad guy or bad country.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

And making that a security focus as opposed to like a political economy issue. But I think that that Also informed our analysis of like, why the theory of China needs to be developed more outside of, again, a moralistic framework.

[B]

Right. It's really, I mean, that, that the penultimate chapter, the one that lays out your theory of China. And I want to get into this a little bit more. It's interesting because it really is the only chapter that shifts from diagnosing US Pathologies to really making claims about Chinese internal dynamics. And I am really interested in how you guys approach that. It's not actually all that vital to the argument of the book, but I'm still curious what some of your other sources were. So you had Klein and Pettis trade wars or class wars. What were some of the other things that were that you were reading that informed your thinking on China?

[C]

Yeah, Jessica Chen wise, her husband, Jeremy Wallace, because he's done a bunch about the central. I mean, you wrote a version of this a few months ago, but it's the centrality of economic growth to this notion of legitimacy. But legitimacy is kind of a complicated concept. So a bunch of that stuff was floating around to Mike's point, about people like Kyle Chan who were, were not on the radar really in the 20, like 2022 is when we were doing the bulk of the writing and then sort of polishing it off in 2023. And like a lot has changed in the way the sort of pundit class in China Watchers talk about China the past few years. And you know the thing, I don't think our basic argument would change and I don't think our theory of China would have to change much either. But like the beating heart of the theory of China that we have is about like Chinese domestic inequality and then connecting that to ethnonationalism and jingoism. And the reason why this is important in the context of our argument, you're right that it's not essential. But at some point you have to have an account if you're going to like, we're talking to Washington with this book, right. This is a Washington facing book in a way. But we're telling them hard truths. And so because of that we have to kind of speak in a vocabulary that they're able to process. And in fact, citing Klein and Pettis is one way of doing that because Klein and Pettus is the language of Washington. Like, Washington has cynically embraced all that crap. So yeah, like, you have to like, in order to have these conversations in dc, you have to have an account for some, if not all of the like, observables of Chinese state behavior. Like the things that America feels scan like the national security state feels scandalized about, right?

[B]

No, I, I, yeah, you're preaching to the choir. I mean, I, I, I, that's sort of I, I have to do that all the time. I feel like compelled to do that constantly. And you know, I've written about that quite a bit. Let's move into this. I mean, because like I said, it's not absolutely core. But the core argument, though, you see great power competition as something that's basically hardened from an analytical framework into something akin to an ideology. Right. Something closer to a faith commitment, not just an inference from facts. Walk us through what you guys believed actually happened. What are the mechanisms that you would identify that made this so central to the way that Americans view China? I mean, it's a fairly recent development, right? I mean, it's only in the last decade or so. I mean, is it like status incentives in the policy world? Is it like budget politics? Is it like think tank capture by the military industrial complex? Is it media dynamics? All the above? I mean, so what turned that idea into like this unquestionable premise? And yeah, Mike, I am aware that this is very much like one of the questions you were about to ask me when we do our fireside sat in a little bit. But I mean, I swear I had this question on paper before.

[A]

No, I mean, I think it's a great one. I mean, I think for what we outlined in the book are a series of events and steps taken outside and within the US national security establishment that lead toward Great Park. Competition being a thing that can't be questioned. I mean, or competition or rivalry with China's. I think that can't be questioned. This is axiomatic. Or there's a bipartisan embrace or a consensus around it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

By now, I think the first is sort of the recognition that the war on terror is not going well. Like, like the war on terror is a dead end and there needs to be sort of a refocusing of US foreign policy away from the Middle East. And this starts to happen in the end of the Obama administration.

[B]

You know, psychological.

[A]

A pivot, right, Exactly. Pivots. But it really takes hold by the end of the second Obama administration, by 2015, 2016. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter is using the term great power competition. It's become, you know, the next buzzword saying that China is now a threat as opposed to a cooperative actor. I think the second thing, obviously, is sort of how Americans interpret what's happening in China. So Xi Jinping and the Rise of Xi and the Belt and Road Initiative and the growth rates that China has experience during the Obama years start to raise concerns and frighten American policymakers. Kind of akin to like the panic over Japan in the 80s, but now with security concerns related to Taiwan and other things. And then the Belt and Road Initiative seeming to be a sort of a project that counters American exports and affluence that began after the post war period. And now you've got this sort of, oh, China is now actually a rival economic rival, potentially strategic threat. And then I think there's just sort of things that happen domestically in the United States with the Trump administration getting elected, Trump getting elected in 2016, where his national security team just says China is the threat and it's the only threat and we have to do everything we can to stop China and refocusing everything around China and then not so much the domestic side of things in that framework, but then Biden coming along in 2021 and basically adopting everything that Trump said about China, keeping many of the export controls and tariffs that Trump put into place and then also adding on to that, which is where our book kind of comes in and saying, well, we can actually engage in a project of domestic rebuilding through the China threat.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That build back better or build back better worlds can be a project that brings Americans more jobs, that it can rejuvenate our, our social welfare, say. And it's a way of getting out of like a neoliberal, like into a post neoliberal framework which, you know, that, that obviously is, is eluding us at this, at this moment. So, so I think those two. And I don't know, Van, I wouldn't say and add anything onto that, but I think those were some of the major factors that made great power competition be an ideology as opposed to like a just a framework for understanding and a contested one for understanding the world.

[C]

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.

[B]

We know that because of the historical lessons of the corporate Cold War. I mean, Mike, you have written that the historical Cold War is doing way too much normative work in today's debates that policymakers are invoking this romanticized, completely sanitized version that actually bears little resemblance to the actual history. If you had to pick maybe one or two canonical misrememberings, myths about the Cold War that have persisted that are exerting a distorting effect on current China policy. What would you name and what would you change about the way that those stories are told?

[A]

Yeah, I think, I think there are two main ones in general.

[B]

Oh, good.

[A]

Convenient. Yeah. I think the first was that the Cold War was a sort of 45 year, 45 year, like long peace that it was really came down to a conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. And yeah, there was Vietnam and there was bad proxy wars and people died. But in the end, the Soviet Union fell, the United States triumphed. Liberal democracy, liberal democratic capitalism won the day. And this great power competition between the Soviet Union paid dividends for humanity. And so there's a bit of truth to that in the sense that capitalism, liberal capitalism, democratic capitalism, triumphed during the Cold War. But the Cold War was incredibly violent, and it was incredibly violent for our purposes in Asia. You know, it was incredibly violent in countries like China, in Vietnam, in Indonesia as well. And to ally the deaths of millions of people and say, well, this was simply a long peace or was ultimately just a peaceful period with some interregnums sort of discounts the violence that's inherent into great power competition. Not just during the Cold War, but other eras of great power or competition between great powers. Sure. And I think the second was there related to that was that the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union and the framework of containment of Soviet Union. That was the correct analysis and that was the correct framework that you can contain the Soviet Union, that you can isolate it. And by the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union collapses and our strategy is vindicated. Strategies vindicated. Yes. Plutocracy reigns and kleptocracy reigns in the Soviet Union and now the former Soviet Union. But setting aside that a little invasion.

[B]

Here and there, you know, Crimea next in 2014 and you know, full scale invasion.

[A]

Yeah. Setting aside all that history, you can still sort of say, well, the Soviet Union fell and containment worked. And you know, for our analysis, and there's lots of literature on this, like the fall of the Soviet Union was mostly due to Soviet internal conditions. The United States didn't really. There was no arms race that pushed the Soviet Union to outspend the United States. There. There was no. It was very hard for the United States to induce Soviet behavior in a way that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. So if we're applying this to China, which sometimes the Cold War, as, you know, the new Cold War to China, then like two things. One, that analogy of the, of containment doesn't work in a, in a state like Like China, where it's a much, obviously I'm saying, you know, this is basic, but much more developed economically than the Soviet Union. Soviet Union was an autarkic system. China is obviously not. So the Soviet analogy doesn't work because the Cold War analogy doesn't work. Cold analogy doesn't work because the Soviet analogy doesn't work. And then the second thing is sort of, well, what's the implication here? Do you want the Chinese government and system to collapse? Do you want to see the collapse of the Chinese economy? Given the integration of the Chinese economy into not just the American economy, but the global economy? Do you want to see the fall of Xi Jinping and potentially sort of the political vacuum that might leave and the disruption and chaos? I think those actually aren't good things for global stability. Setting aside how you feel about CCP and Xi, I think those things aren't good for the world overall in terms of benefiting stability and peace. So I think the Cold War analogy, as it applied misremembers or altogether just purposely forgets those lessons to justify policy actions in the here and now and are flattening and reductionist overall and certainly inherently.

[B]

Yeah, totally, totally. Van, over to you. You guys have written about how US threat inflation regarding China tends to boomerang back. It gets incorporated into Beijing's domestic politics, into the PLA's planning, which then rebounds, you know, into Washington as proof of Chinese malign intent. Can you sort of map that, that feedback loop for us, maybe with a concrete recent example? I mean, give us maybe a counterfactual, what's one policy choice the US could have made differently that would have dampened rather than amplified this pernicious cycle.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, so our, our assessment is that Sino US Relations is a security dilemma.

[B]

Exactly.

[C]

Which in IR is this obviously like one of the most foundational concepts in the field where.

[B]

Yeah, I went to Cal. Robert Jervis.

[C]

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.

[B]

Right, Right.

[C]

This is overwhelmingly about China. A little bit Russia, a little bit North Korea, but not a. Not $1.7 trillion. You know, it's all China. Everybody knows that. That from the US Perspective, from the strategist perspective, is just like, prudent or precautionary or like, of course we want nuclear superiority over China. That's how we keep deterrence. But you look at PLA investments in their nuclear arsenal the past 10 years over the same period of time, and they're surging relative to what they were historically. Right. It's from a very low baseline. We used to call this minimum deterrence. That was what we used to think of as China's nuclear doctrine. And now there's a question about whether they've moved away from it. But the way I think about this is in the context of China planning for nuclear war relative to America, which has nuclear superiority, a favorable nuclear imbalance. Right. China, even if they have a minimum deterrence nuclear doctrine, what the. Where the minimum is has to shift based on what the US Is, is doing and what the US is investing in. So as the US decides to like plow all this money into nuclear modernization, the knock on effect of that is that China has to do some element of like keeping up with the Joneses nuclear wise. And so that looks like more nuclear silos, more nuclear warheads. The arsenal grows. Like how can it not if your principal adversary that you're like planning against is doing $1.7 trillion. And so we end up creating. And then we look at China modernizing its nuclear arsenal and then we say, oh my God, they're modernizing their nuclear arsenal.

[B]

Let's add another trillion to that. Yeah, it's interesting that you picked this example. I mean, and I'm sort of hoping you would because it really echoes exactly what my conversation with Zhao Tong at the Carnegie Endowment International piece talked about. We did a show together about this. It was a really. Yeah, really good. I'll make sure to put a link to that in the show notes so that people can check out that conversation. Because he exercised that same kind of strategic empathy or you know, he emphasizes that, that, that aspect to the Chinese deterrent calculation and why China has massively increased their own nuclear deterrent. Let's. I want to dive into the real heart of your argument which is really about national security. Keynesianism, which I think is, is a fantastic phrase. You guys make this sharp argument basically that defense heavy stimulus, what you guys term, like I said, national security Keynesianism is actually really capital intensive. It's really bad at job creation. It's actually contrary to what we think. It actually funnels money not to a big broad working class, but to a very narrow set of elite actors. If we took the same top line spending that's currently justified by rivalry politics and we redirected it presumably into civilian spending, into R and D, into climate infrastructure, into supply chain resilience, into public health, I mean, sure, I'd love that. Is that politically viable? I wonder. This feels like a super important piece of what we would need in order to win this argument. So how do you guys address the political viability of this? I mean I actually am detecting even in MAGA less of an appetite for really, really heavy defense spending. So is this like your moment? And if so, how do you present your argument now to the American people?

[C]

Well, okay, so there is not MAGA elites are the ones who are co signing the trillion dollar war machine. Yeah, the working, I think the working stiff who happens to just find anti woke stuff appealing and you know, likes Trump or something like those there is definitely like a populist vibe. That is if. If not anti militarist, at least anti. Let's spend all of our federal budget on the war machine. You know, like at some level, people know it's a grift, but like, we bring some of the receipts for that because it's like the interest alone on U.S. financing for the war on terror, which is still. This is a running tab. It's not done. But as of our calculation, it was $925 billion. And that's money spent on debt servicing, not jobs, not wages, not welfare. And then the military, the Brown Univers cost, Brown University cost of war project, they have this whole thing about, like, the job multiplier effect of federal spending. And when they spend dollar for dollar on the military, it produces fewer jobs than the same amount of spending in, like, any other sector of the economy.

[B]

It's like a shitty Keynesian multiplier effect.

[C]

Yes. And if you're committed to this whole, like, national security Keynesianism framework, it also means that you have to have a bad guy in mind, which is obviously China. And if you have that bad guy in mind, then when you're trying to ironically grow certain strategic sectors of your economy, like your domestic EV production with the big three automakers, you're going to have to go about it in a way that cuts you off from the world's leading source of not just raw materials inputs and processing China, but also the leading source of, like, I mean, IP innovation in the green tech sector. You know, like, you need. The ironic thing about where. Where we sit now is that, like, American, you know, automakers need to partner with Chinese firms to be competitive in this supposed future of the world economy sector of, like, green tech. But if you're committed to national security Keynesianism as your orientation, you can't do that. Instead, you cut yourself off from Chinese innovation and Chinese partnership.

[B]

See, Mike, you need to make your students listen to this podcast. I just had this great session with some of my students in which they kind of indulged all the things that we object to. I don't think they've read your book yet. Huh?

[A]

I don't assign it.

[B]

You don't assign it? That would be kind of.

[A]

Yeah, weirdly, I should maybe. Yeah, it's too egotistical, I think.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the problem with us. I know we're too modest about this stuff, but. No, that's.

[A]

That.

[B]

That's exactly it. I mean, and look, that's. That's how it hurts the American people. Let's also talk about how it weakens democracy, which is another thing that you promised in the subtitle of your book that you do, because, yeah, like I said, you know, when you securitize the relationship, you securitize dissent. You encourage that kind of McCarthyist stuff. You license the kind of identification of internal enemies. It's got all hallmarks of fashionism. We saw this, obviously, with the China Initiative, the spike of Asian American hate crimes. We see this with the moral panic around TikTok, I think. I mean, it strikes me, though, that this seems to go actually in both directions. Right. So the lack of confidence that we have actually in the institutions of an open society with our procedural democracy, the idea that it should be able to inoculate us against supposed Chinese propaganda and stuff like that. I mean, this seems to me to create enemies just as much as framing things as a rivalry. Starting with creating enemies erodes our democracy. It feels like this is a feedback loop between behavior that's sort of bad on both sides, which, you know, you guys argue for the latter, which is, you know, that the framing of this is a rivalry actually erodes democracy. I would also add that, you know, that our loss of faith in democratic institutions compels us to create rivals. I feel like we need to be able to break the cycle somewhere. What's at the top of your list, maybe, Mike, for ways that we can intercede? Where do we stop this?

[A]

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.

[B]

Let's talk about those coalitions. Van, you guys talk about the need to build durable coalitions for more restraint oriented statecraft. Who's in that? What non obvious constituencies would you anchor that in? Is this something for which we very much need to cross party lines for what's the message that aligns the material interest with a less militarized China policy? I mean how do you insulate that coalition from the inevitable oh, soft on China attacks? Or is that. I'll get into maybe why I think maybe the fever has broken a little in America and maybe that won't even be all that necessary going forward. But let's talk about coalitions for restraint.

[C]

Yeah, I mean one preface to that is. I think we make this argument very potently in the book, which is the rally around the flag effect assumption about the use the value of a China boogeyman or the value of a foreign threat. Ah, nationalist cohesion can be the result of having this foreign other to deal with. That is not true. There are actually recent studies that show, in a general sense, a statistical sense, that that's like not. Not really a thing. It's. It's more of like a hokey conventional wisdom thing, but also like what we document in the book. We have, like, multiple chapters, just working through the receipts about this. In a context of high polarization and in a context of high material inequality, it's inevitable that a foreign threat is going to heighten those, like, divisive features of society. And so you see even the likes of, like, a Steve Bannon, he was very big on the China threat, and he. He sells it to the American public and to maga. He sells the China threat as the. He literally says this. We quote him the. The threat that brings America together. Right. And he doesn't.

[B]

We've got people on the left saying the same. Right?

[C]

Yeah. And I don't think that maybe some people on the left believe it. That doesn't make it true. I don't think Steve Bannon actually believes it because he's saying that. He's saying the China threat brings us together at the same time that he is decrying Beijing Biden as a world historical traitor to America because he's in China's pocket and because the dragon's breathing down our neck. And that's why we have to deny certain members of Congress security clearances because they're foreign subversives. You know what I mean? Literal. Literal division. Literally ripping America apart in a direct way and using the China threat to do it as the excuse to do it, while telling us rhetorically that China is the threat that brings us together. The US In Bannon's version of China brings us together is white Christian men.

[B]

Right, right, right, right. Let's talk a little bit about the political landscape right now, because, I mean, your book went to press before Trump's reelection. A lot has happened since. We have seen a pretty remarkable shift in polling. I don't know if you guys saw the Chicago Council survey from October. It showed a majority of Americans now favoring cooperation and engagement with China, up from 40% last year. Democrats have moved much further than Republicans have. I mean, 19 points actually, in favor of engagement. We actually saw our Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, tweet about everlasting peace between us and China. God bless China and the United States of America. Trump himself has been almost effusive about Xi Jinping. From your vantage points, you guys watching Congress, watching the Interagency expert ecosystem. The media has the post Covid moral panic actually abated and if the temperature is dropping, what moved that? Is it, you know, elite rhetoric? Is it good old public exhaustion, which is kind of my pet theory? And then what would, what would you, you know, you guys putting out a new edition of it next year? What, what goes in it now?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I think Trump has definitely changed the landscape to a certain extent. Trump's indecisiveness, if you want to put it in those terms, and his willing to talk to Beijing and at least also force Beijing in his view to try to do things to the US benefit. I mean it's shaking up the foundations of great power competition. I think great power competition was framed under Biden is dead for now. But I don't think the American public was ever on board with like China as, as a universal threat. If you look at some of the polling, there's a great piece by Stephen Wertheim in the Financial Times a few months ago where he cited polls showing that only one third of Americans view China as a threat. And there's other ways that this materializes and that, you know, China becomes a threat when it, when it's invoked as an economic threat to Americans. But I think most people in the United States don't get on board with like sort of the thinking that China is a universal threat. I think it comes to the fore when as kind of Van was saying, elites like ramp it up and it cycles in the discourse in ways that become destructive.

[C]

It's totally an elite project.

[A]

Totally.

[C]

Great power competition is such a, even that that phrase itself is so foreign to normal people.

[B]

You know, it's not the sort of thing that you're work and stiff is going to come up with. So maybe Van, the last question to you before we move on to recommendations, maybe it's the hardest one. I mean, so great power competition is the wrong master narrative. What's the right one? You got a nice elevator pitch, a three word phrase, something that rolls right off the tongue. That should be the next master narrative when it comes to how the US should frame its relationship with China.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, I think we need a geopolitics of peace. You know, I think we in the center, the centerpiece of that would be a Sino US detente 2.0. And I think the struggle that like Mike and I have been trying to work out and some of the, some of the writing that we've done together and separately since the book came out is kind of trying to grope and feel out that area and flesh out what that looks like. Because it's one thing to say we need to cooperate with China, or it's one thing to say we need a new day with China. It's another thing to provide an argument about what that, what the foundation for that would be. Especially because the original detente formula was kind of unique and brittle and imperfect in a lot of ways. And like we would want if we were going to do it again, a new Nixon goes to China kind of thing, we would need to have a stable, more durable foundation for it, ideally. And what we outline in the, the well, this gets to your recommendations thing, but like in the concluding chapter of the book, we sort of sketch out what that, you know, material foundation of detente 2.0 would look like.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And you have some three main pillar ideas behind it and why don't we go into what those are? So I mean, if I, if memory serves, the three things were like war prevention over war preparation. Another was, and I'm not sure if I'm getting these in the right order. The another one was just really leaning into, we've talked about it already, into, into security dilemma sensibility. And the third one is the one I really want to. I mean, I think those, the first two are relatively self explanatory. And everyone who listens to this show has heard me talk quite a bit about security dilemma sensibility and related concepts like strategic empathy and cognitive empathy. But the one that I really want you guys to talk to me about because I didn't quite get it and it's sort of new to me, associative balancing. What is associative balancing? And can you show me what that looks like in action?

[C]

Yeah, I mean, so the starting point is that like Washington loves to talk about the balance of power, but they invoke it as a misnomer, a category error almost all the time. Like they talk about the balance of power as the justification for why they do things and why they do arms racing and all of this in the war planning. But what they're actually doing is trying to achieve a favorable imbalance of power. And so the idea that power balancing can furnish a kind of international stability, like we basically accept that. But there's a form of balancing that is what you would consider like antagonistic or like other scholars, Richard Little has written about this, there's an antagonistic form of balancing that is confrontational and zero sum. And it's the balance of power as like Washington does it, which is the opposite of balancing. It's the opposite of an equilibrium. Right. But there's another tradition of power balancing that, that is closer to what Sino US detente was in the first place, which is associative balancing, which is about achieving a balance of power through accommodation and restraint and careful statecraft, not through arms accumulation. And it's that latter tradition of associative balancing that is totally, totally foreign to Washington. And it's that form of balancing that could be the foundation for everything else to make a difference, to make a pivot away from all of this. A new pivot. There we go.

[B]

A pivot away from the pivot.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

No. And the only thing I'll add to that is I think this begins with things you wrote recently about which is sort of accepting the world as it is, accepting that we're in a multipolar world, that the United States, this attempt to pursue primacy in this world is anachronistic and it's not going to yield the same results that the United States tried to achieve during the Cold War. And the sooner Washington comes to terms with that and that China is representing not as just a strategic threat, but an opportunity and one that is shaping the world in ways that we still haven't take second stock of. I think that's, that's the building block. So that's accepting that, I think, is the. Is the route to a more peaceful engagement with the world as it is, because we know that primacy is not going to work and we're not going to see a better, more prosperous America as a result.

[B]

That's a fantastic note to end on. We do. Speaking of my talk, need to hustle across campus to where we're going to do a little show. Mike and I are going to talk about, I guess, my essay and some other stuff. Van, let's get a quick recommendation from you. Do you have a book or a film or anything that you've seen recently that you want to recommend for our listeners?

[C]

So I'm reading right now this book called the long 20th century by Giovanni Arrighi. Very good, very good. It's kind of like a world systems approach to understanding how we ended up in our current crisis of capitalism. And actually we didn't get to this, but it's the crisis of capitalism that is in a weird way, spawning great power competition or providing fuel to it. You know, like the idea of powerful states mobilizing on behalf of their capital interests and their national development. That is great power competition. Like great power competition is inter imperial Rivalry, in a way. And Giovanni Orighi's book kind of gives us a framework. Framework for that, even though it's not about China and the U.S. oh, fantastic.

[B]

That sounds really good. The long 20th century. Mike, what do you have for us?

[A]

I'm going to recommend a book I'm reading right now by Vladislav Zubak, which is the World of the Cold War, 1945-1991. So Vlad Zubak has written a series of great books, particularly on Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War. His most recent one, before that was Collapse, which was about the fall of the Soviet Union and the Gorbachev years, is a fantastic book. But this book is a survey of the Cold War and a new one. There have been many great surveys of the Cold War by John Gaddisad, but that's what got me first interested in the Cold War, is reading surveys of the Cold War and made me want to be a Cold War historian. It's taking me back to my intellectual roots in many ways. And Zubak essentially is arguing that kind of things we're talking about now, which is the US attempt to preserve a model of capitalism and capitalist development is what really is at the heart of the Cold War. And so the broader world of the Cold War is about this economic system that is contested and shaped by geopolitics and Just a brilliant read and he's a brilliant historian.

[B]

So I'm going to throw my recommendation Vladislav Zubak. Fantastic. I look forward to reading that. Loved Arn Investad's book. And by the way, I guess we're gonna see him tonight. Yeah, I'm looking forward to.

[C]

I'm so jealous of you guys.

[B]

Read this new book. Yeah, I wish we were here, man. I mean, sorry you didn't make it to Providence that one time.

[C]

I know.

[B]

My. My recommendation is for the new Vince Gilligan show called Pluribus on Apple tv.

[C]

Oh, is it good? I saw a trailer for it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Oh, man, it's. It's really good. And you guys will. I think you'll pick up on the subtext of it because it is really sort of about the end of post enlightenment, sort of Western individual liberalism. And there's good kind of deep political, philosophical subtext to it that I'm sure the two of you will either read into it or pick up on it. If it wasn't actually. If it wasn't indeed intended. But I couldn't help but read it that way. Fantastic show so far. I've only seen two episodes, but it's yeah, check it out. Set in Albuquerque is all Vince Gilligan shows apparently are. All right. Hey gentlemen, it's been such a pleasure to talk to you both. I look forward to having you both back on the show again, separately or together. And can't wait to keep reading what you guys produce.

[A]

All right.

[C]

Thanks man. This was fun.

[A]

This is a pleasure. Thanks so much.

[B]

You've been listening to the cynical podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited and mastered by me, Kaiser Guo. Support the show through substack at where there is a growing offering of terrific original China related writing and audio. Or email [e-mail] if you've got ideas on how you can help out with the show. Don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin Madison's center for East Asian Studies for support the show this year. Huge thanks to my guests Michael Brennis and Van Jackson. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. Take care.