Understanding Primacy, with Van Jackson

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain minor errors.

[00:00:00] Sound on Tape: This podcast is presented by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights. 

[00:00:07] Van Jackson: I think we should treat green tech manufacturing as a public good that doesn’t have to be profitable. So, I think it would be okay to overproduce this stuff and then give the shit away or sell it super cheap and then everybody wins.

[00:00:21] But in that case It’s not capital that would be leading the green transition. It would be long term subsidies for a socialized industry that’s in the common good. That would be an investment in society. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re throwing money at industries so that they can dominate the green economy as a profit center.

[00:00:44] William Lawrence: This is the Hegemonicon podcast, where we are investigating the workings of power. What is power? How does it work? Who has it? What are they doing with it? How the heck do we get it? And other small questions like that. I’m your host, William Lawrence, and I’m an organizer from Lansing, Michigan. Currently I work with the Rent is Too Damn High Coalition, an alliance of tenant unions and housing justice groups across the state of Michigan.

[00:01:13] Formerly I was a climate justice organizer for 10 years, including as a co founder of Sunrise Movement, the youth organization that put the Green New Deal on the political map. Just a quick note. We recorded the interviews for this season between May and July. Now we’re releasing them in August and September.

[00:01:30] A lot has happened in the world in between those times, such as Biden dropping out of the race. So if you hear us speaking with blissful ignorance of what was to come, that’s what’s going on. But I think that the conversations are going to hold up very well for our tasks of building an internationalist left in the months and years to come.

[00:01:57] Hey folks welcome back to the hegemonic on podcast. I am your host, William Lawrence recording from Lansing, Michigan, USA. Planet Earth. This is the latest installment of our series on internationalism, and I’m very pleased to be joined by Van Jackson. Van is a scholar of international relations at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and a senior non resident fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.

[00:02:25] C. He specializes in East Asian and Pacific security, critical analysis of defense issues, and the intersection of working class interests with foreign policy. Van is the author of four books, including the forthcoming book, The Rivalry Peril, How Great Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy.

[00:02:45] And he’s also writes a very excellent blog on Substack, to which I subscribe and host the undiplomatic blog. Podcast which has been very provocative and thought provoking for for me. And I’m really glad to have Van here on the show. Van, welcome. 

[00:03:00] Van Jackson: Thanks so much, dude. This is probably my most exciting appearance that I’m going to have this year.

[00:03:04] Like I’m a huge fan of the show. 

[00:03:06] William Lawrence: That’s 

[00:03:06] Van Jackson: very 

[00:03:06] William Lawrence: kind. Thank you. So I spoke recently with Toby Chow, who you also know, and he let it, he laid out the basic trajectory by which national economic competition can. Become inter imperialist rivalry and ultimately war. This path was followed most infamously in the lead up to world war one.

[00:03:29] And then that one was so fun that we had to do it twice because world war one didn’t actually even. Fix that syndrome. You and Toby and myself and many others are all concerned that we may be heading down this path again. Now, in the context of the global turn towards green technology and in that context, rivalry between the two.

[00:03:51] The U S and China. And I really wanted to talk to you on the show because, we come at this from very different angles, but now we’ve come to be looking at some of the same challenges. My background is in climate organizing. Yours is in the foreign policy establishment. You worked in the Obama administration.

[00:04:06] In my world, many people have come to support Biden’s industrial policy on a basis that sounds something like this, quote, we need to build a durable domestic political coalition in favor of climate action. Therefore, climate action must be a driver of good American jobs for the next several decades.

[00:04:25] And if that requires boxing out China in order to be able to create the good jobs here, So be it, the alternative would be that we actually fail to build a constituency for climate action here in the United States. That would mean we would fail on fighting climate change. Now, from your perspective, I think you have been saying, and repeatedly in your writing and everything else you’re doing, you say whoa, this is like actually missing the bigger picture people in climate world.

[00:04:51] It may not be that the climate goals, no matter what the Biden administration says, are actually driving the agenda here. In fact, it may be that the climate hawks are being deployed or manipulated in the service of a separate and pre existing agenda, which is coming out of the defense sector, which is the maintenance of American primacy.

[00:05:17] on the world stage. And it’s this pursuit of primacy that is really driving the show here. Climate goals and domestic policies be damned. Or maybe to put it better, it’s the climate goals and the domestic policies that are being manipulated by the foreign policy establishment in service of a pre existing goal, which is the permanent maintenance of American primacy.

[00:05:40] So in this interview, I’d like to really break this all down step by step, because for those like myself who are newer to these kind of discourses, I haven’t been entrenched in the foreign policy establishment and intellectual discourse like you have, this may be a little bit of a surprise.

[00:05:57] So let’s start with this concept of primacy, which was unfamiliar to me before I encountered it in your writing. What is primacy and could you tell us the history of US primacy as a policy objective? 

[00:06:11] Van Jackson: Yeah, that’s a fantastic setup. So you might have been unfamiliar with the word primacy in a foreign policy context, but you’ve probably always known euphemisms for it, like liberal hegemony, US led global order, sometimes, yet at the rosiest level, American leadership of the world, or in the more pejorative sense, American global empire, right?

[00:06:34] And those are all adjacent descriptions or substitute frames or whatever, but like they’re often imprecise and slippery. They’re basically different rhetorical constructs that all have a primacy strategy underneath it as its underlying premise. So what is primacy? It’s a specific.

[00:06:52] Ideal type approach to foreign policy, which means there are standards we can use to judge whether that’s what’s going on at any given moment. And this is going to sound fucking evil. Primacy as a strategy explicitly claims That security for the U. S. requires the ability to dominate others, especially East Asia and the Middle East.

[00:07:15] So primacy doesn’t presuppose what to do in order to be the dominant power economically and militarily, but because it’s a theory of security based on extreme power imbalances in the world system, it frames global politics in zero sum politics. Relative gains terms like it’s a very predatory way of relating to the world.

[00:07:38] So then the big question is how do we know this is us strategy and where the hell does it come from? There’s a vast literature in mainstream security studies mainstream ir international relations that takes U. S. primacy as a given or as an analytical assumption. And then from the mid nineties up through the Obama years, basically most of the top scholars in the guns and bombs, international relations world were actively debating primacy in the top journals, right?

[00:08:13] Whether primacy was sustainable, what kind of effects it would generate. Like a blowback or counterbalancing. What did the Iraq war signal about American primacy? Was primacy a game that was worth the candle, right? But we also know that primacy is us strategy. That domination is an end and means here in a very direct sense because since the 1980s, U.

[00:08:35] S. national security strategy documents have repeatedly stated that the U. S., like U. S. dominance, U. S. preeminence, is an end and means of U. S. policy. So I published a book last year, early last year, called Pacific Power Paradox, and I go over a lot of this history. In more fine grain detail, but every presidential administration since Reagan has explicitly defined a favorable unmatched balance of power for the U.

[00:09:03] S. as basically a vital national interest. And U. S. military superiority is like the key wager within that. And some Wertheim have shown how this obsession with primacy and an imbalance of power goes back to post World War II. The internationalism versus isolationism, that kind of false frame thing, but it’s like literally in the documents that are public record and in the archives, we can see this all the way up through the Biden administration.

[00:09:33] And that’s not to say that presidencies have all been the same, there’s a bunch of variation between Obama and Reagan, but in terms of our basic approach to the world and the assumption that us preeminence is vital. That is a through line in US foreign policy. That’s what naturalizes a trillion dollar defense budget in Washington’s imagination.

[00:09:54] And the reason this matters is not just because we should want to understand what the national security state thinks it’s doing on its own terms, although we should want to understand that because then we can sift through and find the contradictions. But even beyond that, primacy matters because with Well, the basic strategy itself hasn’t changed since the eighties, but the requirements of that same strategy, the requirements of primacy are getting more extreme, more desperate as the world changes and all this great power competition stuff that we’re doing with China.

[00:10:26] It’s not just a ruling class deflection from problems of inequality or whatever. It’s a spatial. Geopolitical fix to our relative decline, and so our share of control in the world system by like almost any measure has been getting diluted in favor of others. Most acutely relative to China, and this often gets described as post unipolar or multipolar, right?

[00:10:53] Multipolarity, but trying to do a strategy that requires you to have all the power in the world when you don’t That creates a powder keg of this of a situation like at the end of the Cold War we could do a primacy Strategy and we didn’t have to change much about our Foreign policy, but now if your goal is to claw back a greater share of power, you have to start doing crazy shit kneecap in your enemies, containment strategies, arms racing, blacklists, tariffs, the securitization of economic policy, right, which is what leads to economic nationalism, which feeds right back into your conversation with Toby.

[00:11:33] William Lawrence: Interesting. So you’re this again, you’re right that this is stuff that is so, well, it’s just omnipresent in a sort of American political discourse that it starts to just look like the wallpaper or the air we breathe. Permanent military superiority is it’s the assumption and it’s the objective.

[00:11:55] It’s maintenance is the objective. And as you note, as the U. S. ‘s share of the global economy dwindles, becomes smaller and smaller in comparative terms. Because of the rise of China. Now, the requirements of maintaining primacy are getting ever more extreme, and this is showing up in our policy, and it’s driving what are being posed as Oh, just hard nose, common sense policies for how to deal with the climate crisis or maintain our domestic political coalitions.

[00:12:28] So let’s talk about this then in the context of how this is shaping Bidenomics and including and especially it’s it’s green energy policies. I’m drawing here from a piece you wrote on your blog that was titled On China Shock 2. 0 and the Green Industrial Roars. You write, and I quote, There was another problem with Bidenomics or the new Washington consensus.

[00:12:58] It was rightly critical of neoliberalism, but it involved literally no steps to free most of the world from the constraints of, or the exposure to, neoliberal policies. Binomics was critical of neoliberalism, but involved no steps to free the rest of the world From exposure to neoliberalism, you go on US economic statecraft guided by a strategy of primacy sought only to free the US of neoliberal constraints, but at the expense of others, such a divisible world sacrificing approach to political economy was only justifiable if your larger project was effectively one of containment and domination.

[00:13:43] So, Let’s take this one step at a time. First of all, how has binomics, for all of that’s been written about it being a post neoliberal order and a move beyond neoliberalism, how has binomics, in fact, left the rest of the world empty? Constrained and still exposed to neoliberal policies. 

[00:14:08] Van Jackson: Yeah. Tragically, it’s not really dealing with the world as it is.

[00:14:10] It’s dealing with America as it is at best. So a lot of progressives got used to thinking of neoliberalism as privatization, deregulation, and austerity, right? But those things are actually. Expressions of neoliberalism during the post or expressions of capitalism even during the post industrial historical conjuncture, right?

[00:14:32] What do those kinds of policies do? How do they work? Who benefits from those kinds of policies? Those kinds of questions clarify that neoliberalism is just capitalism taken to its logical extreme. Right? Neoliberalism is precisely state power wielded on behalf of capital interests against worker interests.

[00:14:54] That’s happening in all of the thousand definitions of neoliberalism, right? There’s so many ways to define it, but that’s always a through line, right? And what made neoliberalism starting in the seventies such a break from the previous economic order was that it was. So rapacious that in a post industrial world, it was willing to cannibalize the social order that sustains capitalism itself.

[00:15:17] Right. And even the environment, which is the kind of nation, Nancy Frazier argument by dynamics is still state power wielded on behalf of capital interests. It’s not really disciplining capital. It’s throwing money at capital, right? The interesting debate is about whether it’s doing so at the expense of workers.

[00:15:37] And I think that’s a question where reasonable people can and do disagree in terms of how by dynamics inadvertently screws over most of the developing world. There’s a, there’s. A few ways. One is that it’s doing subsidies and tax credits and putting up tariff walls to support some sections of us capital, some us firms, but only after it spent the past 40 years trying to shape the rest of the world and influence the rest of the world and especially East Asia.

[00:16:08] To drop tariffs and quotas, to increase imports, to stop subsidizing infant industries and our, to obey our intellectual property, patents and stuff as part of preserving and prolonging our monopoly of high profit, high productivity. Sectors of the economy and you know our track record of convincing other states to do this to basically do neoliberalism It’s mixed.

[00:16:34] It’s actually been least successful in the highest growth region East Asia they’re the ones who least went down the neoliberal path. But now After 40 years of imposing that on others, we’re saying suddenly it’s good for us to do those things. And you might say, okay, great, so now if we’re doing economic nationalism, why doesn’t the rest of the world just do economic nationalism?

[00:16:57] Well, now we live in a world where only rich nations can afford to support The domestic industries of the future in the way that by dynamics is right. If it’s true that green capital and green industry is the future of the global economy, which is what by dynamics kind of bets. Well, that’s a future where nobody except for China and a few European countries can subsidize green tech the way, like the way that we can, right.

[00:17:24] And that means the rest of the world is not competitive. in the future that we’re betting on. So that’s one way in which by dynamics is a problem for others, but there’s bigger ways, right? A second way is that the rest of the world, especially the global South is still subject to the, so called structural adjustments.

[00:17:44] When they have to take out loans from the IMF. So who are the foot soldiers of neoliberalism, right? The world bank and IMF were the key institutions of that project. And they’re still putting austerity requirements on loans to the global South. There’s no part of Bidenomics that has. Involved reforming the institutions that were the biggest promoters of neoliberal policies and in fact a lot of the global south started looking for capital from china and loans from china Specifically as an alternative to dealing with the imf and by dynamics does nothing to even address this So even if we accept that by dynamics escapes neoliberalism It does not follow that the rest of the world also gets to escape it but there’s a third problem here, which is that the larger grand strategy that by dynamics of a part of is a part of is primacy, right?

[00:18:39] So it doesn’t, by dynamics does not exist on its own. It exists to support great power competition with China. And that’s not just political framing. It’s not just rhetoric to get a bill passed. That has material consequences. US foreign policy right now. In Asia, in the Pacific islands, in Europe, even in the middle East, right?

[00:19:00] It’s actively trying to remove China from technology supply chains, right? To block Chinese state owned enterprises operating overseas. Most famously the campaign to get Huawei. Globally banned, which again, it had a kind of mixed record. It turns out that in a lot of developing countries, Huawei is a kind of low cost provider of digital infrastructure and cell phone towers and stuff.

[00:19:23] But us diplomacy, us political capital is being used to basically ask the global South. To choose between China and the U S for economic development. And that’s a farce for many reasons, but the biggest is that the global South development prospects are close to zero if they can’t draw from both China and the U S and so our foreign policy literally keeps a large swath of the world underdeveloped.

[00:19:51] And by dynamics is part of that. 

[00:19:55] William Lawrence: Want to skip on down in your article a little bit here and just ask for a followup on that, you’re making this claim basically that primacy is is prime and the everything that we have now calling by dynamics is secondary. Now I think one, if you were just approaching this without a historical.

[00:20:16] view of it. You could argue and people do that. It’s actually the other way around. Well, okay, this China competition has to be on the agenda because it helps with our domestic politics and it helps to protect our American industries. But like we just need to do a little bit of this to ride through this difficult period, build the domestic constituency for climate action, build up U.

[00:20:34] S. Green capital. But we’re not going to escalate beyond where this is now. This is this is just a sort of a little bit of a distasteful part of turning a difficult corner in U. S. In the U. S. History while also taking the sting out of, Trump ism, which has been making hay, by the on the decline of U.

[00:20:53] S. Manufacturing. But you point out in your essay that, there’s actually just a lot of inherent contradictions within the policy, even if you just examine them on their face now. So you write. Depending on the day of the week, U. S. industrial policy claims to be about economic growth, the quote unquote middle class, a green energy transition, reclaiming a higher share of global manufacturing, a small yard high fence meant to contain China’s military power, U.

[00:21:21] S. dominance in future economic industries, reducing vulnerability to Chinese economic coercion, or preparation for war over Taiwan. And it cannot be all of these things. It cannot even be Most of these things in quote. So I wonder if you could spell that out a little bit more for us. Why can’t it be most of these things?

[00:21:40] What are some of the contradictions embedded in these justifications and why does the sum total point again to the maintenance and expansion of primacy as the actual policy at work here, rather than some sort of, domestic industrial policy? 

[00:21:57] Van Jackson: Yeah, this is a great question. And I should say Stuart Hall is my sensei in thinking of.

[00:22:02] Contradictions as the starting point for consciousness, raising and building movements for change. And in fact, my own, like I had a political evolution that got me to this point. Obviously I didn’t think this way when I worked in the Obama administration and that evolution had everything to do with the contradictions that I was seeing.

[00:22:21] In the foreign policy project that I had been a part of my entire life and when it comes to this industrial policy that we’re doing now or the things we do in the name of industrial policy, there’s a lot of contradictions like if you’re all about the middle class, then cost of living should be a big deal.

[00:22:41] But tariffs increase cost of living, right? And yet tariffs are also part of trying to reclaim a higher share of global manufacturing. And if we think that we should treat green tech manufacturing as, or I guess I should say, I think we should treat green tech manufacturing as a public good that doesn’t have to be profitable.

[00:23:01] So I think it would be okay. To overproduce this stuff and then give the shit away or sell it super cheap and then everybody wins. But in that case, it’s not capital that would be leading the green transition. It would be long term subsidies for a socialized industry that’s in the common good. That would be an investment in society.

[00:23:19] That’s not what we’re doing, right? We’re throwing money at industries so that they can dominate the green economy as a profit center. And the contradiction there is that We cannot simultaneously dominate the green economy and make the green economy a source of good union jobs over time. Why? Because for green dominance, if you want to think of it that way, to be profitable, you have to export at scale.

[00:23:45] That cannot be just a within American borders thing. What foreign markets are able to absorb American exports if the product isn’t dirt cheap? And if it’s dirt cheap, where’s the profit? Right, but there’s another contradiction built into this, which is that if the point of industrial policy is to dominate the future oriented green tech, clean tech, the way that we’re going about it is going to create a crisis of overcapacity in the U.

[00:24:12] S. Right, capital in support of U. S. EVs and U. S. solar needs those export markets in the long run. But export markets mean being competitive with Chinese 15, 000 EVs. Right now, our pricing is triple that. So, subsidies might help lower the costs, but not by 75%, and keeping Chinese batteries out of our EVs.

[00:24:36] Which is part of this industrial policy artificially inflates the cost even further of American EVs. So if industrial policy is about containing China, the small yard high fence thing to pivot off of the green tech thing, just for a second, well, China controls most of the world’s critical minerals that go into renewable battery construction and solar panels.

[00:24:59] So an industrial policy that’s trying to contain China is a policy that risks giving up. On the green transition for lack of source material to support it. Like China views its relationship with us and with the world in a kind of holistic way. They’re not going to put up firewalls where it’s like, Oh, we’ll cooperate on this stuff where we have a vulnerability, but we’re going to compete on this stuff where we have an advantage, they’re not going to sign onto that shit and.

[00:25:28] You want to make us an enemy. You’re a fucking enemy all across all domains of life, right? That’s how this shit works. And we’re trying to pick and choose, and then going back to Bidenomics versus the world, what is the development ladder for the rest of the world? If the economy of the future is still dominated by the global North, like if you’re a Southeast Asian country or a Pacific Island nation, how are you going to be able to afford to import?

[00:25:52] What America produces, and this is, this brings up the other contradiction, maybe the biggest one, which is primacy itself, right? U. S. dollar supremacy, the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Is part of us primacy, but keeping the dollar strong relative to other currencies, massively undermines America’s ability to export sectors of any economy benefit from a cheaper currency and are harmed by a stronger currency.

[00:26:19] Everybody knows this. So American EVs. Are not being built for export realistically, as long as the U S retains dollar supremacy. And so the contradiction is that American EVs are supposed to flex our superiority against China. But as long as we’re doing primacy, we’re undermining our own ability to dominate that industry.

[00:26:40] So the Biden administration is moving the goalposts. On industrial policy all the time, pick your justification. It depends on who they’re talking to or what the context is, but the most consistent through line is national security reasoning as primacy. And the only reason you get bipartisan support for things like the chips act is because it’s about primacy.

[00:27:04] And you look at the statements of Republican senators. And they’re much more explicit about this, more, more consistently open about this. Like they say, this is about us dominance, right? And I have a, there’s more I could say, but I have a book about this in January coming out with Mike Brennis and we walk through all this stuff.

[00:27:22] Cause it’s it’s a lot of contradictions, you’d think you’d find one contradiction and then that would be the core problem. There’s 10. And 

[00:27:31] William Lawrence: once you start listening to what they say, it’s just clear the extent to which they’re rationalizing. It does not make sense.

[00:27:39] Green tech is the industry of the future. We will dominate that industry and export it to the rest of the globe. That’s by dynamics. And then they say, We want to do a, we want to do a binomics for the world. We want to do a global green. It’s well, okay. Can everybody dominate the industry of the future?

[00:27:57] No, that’s a contradiction in terms. 

[00:27:58] Van Jackson: We’re all going to dominate. Or 

[00:28:00] William Lawrence: The inequality the inequality. Is the point the maintenance of inequality and including inequality of wealth is part of the point because as we’re seeing the economic capacity that China has developed, then leads into a military capacity that threatens primacy.

[00:28:17] So we certainly wouldn’t want there to be another China. We’re trying to constrain the China that exists when it comes to there being a threat to U. S. Power on the global stage. But as you said, if we were to actually meaning without meaningfully addressing inequality. On the global stage, who’s going to buy these exports?

[00:28:37] We need to have us. Workers and labor on our side. So there’s no way to get the cost of the EVs as low as the Chinese EVs. So there’s all these contradictions totally built in. And if we could imagine a more equal global playing field, one could imagine being able to cut your way out of some of these contradictions.

[00:28:59] But as long as primacy is the point and inequality is the point, We’re going to end up running in these circles. So I wonder if you could say briefly, we’ll get later into sort of some speculation about the actual emerging impossible horizons of the world system. But just looking narrowly for now.

[00:29:19] Yeah, no small questions. What sort of policy options would be on the menu for the Biden administration or any U. S. Administration in If the maintenance of primacy weren’t the thing that was actually driving the agenda here. 

[00:29:37] Van Jackson: Yeah. So I was, I took this extended tour of the U S recently given talks and promoting books and stuff.

[00:29:44] And my first port of call was DC and it was mostly. progressive audiences, obviously, but the, what passes for progressive in DC is not what we usually mean by progressive and in other parts of the country. And I bring that up because part of what I was pitching was what, if we were to be able to shed our addiction to primacy.

[00:30:08] What would we be trying to do instead, that you have to paint a horizon of the alternative to convince people to give up what they’ve, what they’re going for now. And the pitch that I made, which was super controversial, but I’ll just keep making it is that, if we weren’t doing great power competition as a construct, we could get over our own primacy.

[00:30:29] Then we wouldn’t have to view Chinese over capacity. In solar batteries, EVs as a threat, we could use economic statecraft to strike a kind of grand green bargain with China, there’s a sovereign debt crisis in most of the world right now, it’s slow moving and we don’t narrate it really.

[00:30:47] And so when you don’t narrate a crisis, it’s not. It’s not felt in the public imagination, so it’s, but the suffering is still there. And it happens to be that China holds a lot of sovereign debt and it doesn’t want to write down those losses, even though it has no chance of recouping a lot of this money because countries are debt distressed.

[00:31:08] So we could incentivize China to write down some of those losses, which would alleviate debt distress in the global South. By offsetting it with tariff reductions, right? And we could even sweeten the pot for everybody by using our own climate financing for the Global South to pay for the import of cheap Chinese EV and cheap Chinese solar, which would accelerate a green transition for the Global South.

[00:31:35] If you have a climate first, Approach to the foreign policy. That’s obviously what you would be doing because the metric of success would be Accelerating the green transition come what may right that kind of bargain is such an obvious win Even for u. s workers because a global south that is carrying lower debt loads and is able to speed up a green transition Is a global south that will have much greater ability to import US overcapacity in these industries that by dynamics is investing in, and if we keep the yoke of debt and exposure to the climate crisis, if we keep those things in place, then the global south will remain underdeveloped.

[00:32:15] It will remain a market that can’t absorb. It literally can’t pay to absorb what America produces. But of course, doing all of that stuff means that you cannot treat China like some existential threat. And if you’re not treating China as an existential threat, it becomes a lot harder to justify the size of our national security state.

[00:32:37] So by going down the path of win, we open up some difficult questions that we are not politically. Able to face 

[00:32:48] William Lawrence: that’s interesting. That reminds me of something you wrote in your other recent book. You’re incredibly prolific by the way. And you wrote a good blog post about how to become so prolific and manage one’s writing and that sort of thing.

[00:32:59] You’ve published at least two books in the last 18 months. And you say you have another one coming, but one that you haven’t mentioned is is called grand strategies of the left which I recently read. And one of the things you note in that book is that, The U. S. actually has a lot of slack with which to be able to build goodwill on a global stage that it is currently completely unwilling to use, but you can actually gain a lot without giving up that much, except for kind of the ego identification with primacy.

[00:33:32] But for instance, we have such a. Overwhelming military capacity and our our sort of force projection on in, on every continent of the globe is so overwhelming that you can draw that back by 10 or 15 percent wouldn’t really have a meaningful difference in the balance of power if we’re being real.

[00:33:53] But would be understood rightly to be a huge gesture in the direction of demilitarization and turning down the temperature of conflict worldwide. That’s the sort of thing we could do with actually very little strategic still be fine in sort of strategic terms. We’re not doing that sort of thing.

[00:34:10] Also dollar supremacy and just like the power that the U S has in the international monetary institutions gives us huge range to be able to distribute. If we were to be in favor of reallocating SDR, special drawing rights, which are this sort of wonky for the listeners.

[00:34:27] I’ll just say, basically, this is free money that exists at the IMF that like it’s free money. IMF currency. It’s an IMF currency, but it can be exchanged for dollars and they are allocated to nations around the world. The U S gets an allocation. But it doesn’t use them. So these could be reallocated to nations of the global South.

[00:34:47] We could have done this during the COVID crisis and solved all kinds of problems. There’s a million more problems we could do today. It could be used for debt relief. It could be used for a million things. That’s just That’s a that’s an armament of goodwill that is just like sitting in the cabinet right now, and we’re not using.

[00:35:02] And then similarly, like you said, reducing some of these tariffs now that we’ve created this whole protectionist posture dialing that back a little bit would also be there’s a lot of things we could do to lower the temperature and move towards a more egalitarian, collaborative global environment without having to just Absolutely unilaterally disarm overnight.

[00:35:22] But even that we refuse to do. And instead it seems like we insist on turning up the temperature on all fronts. 

[00:35:30] Van Jackson: Yep, pretty much. This is we were, I worked on a bunch of democratic presidential campaigns in 2020, right? And in, in most of them, it was the case that the foreign policy wonks who were all establishment people for the most part, they were open to alternatives.

[00:35:48] Like they were recognizing that the Trump years had exposed that we are not in a great position long term and that we were, our foreign policy was on the wrong track. So they were open to an alternative to primacy, but what they very quickly concluded was that literally, and you’ll know this phrase, there is no alternative to primacy.

[00:36:10] They’ve logic trapped themselves into a corner that says, Primacy, it’s primacy or bust where the world’s oxygen, we conflate our power with the global public good. And we the problem with that is you then don’t use that power for global public good. You’re using for yourself, like you’ve pathologized, self aggrandizing, exclusionary behavior, predatory behavior, so that’s where we’re at now, and so the whole point of writing that book was really, because it’s more like a liberal facing book than a left facing book, even though it draws Entirely on left ideas about the world, but the whole point of that book was to like put down in paper.

[00:36:50] What are the what’s the trade space? What’s the alternatives that we could be doing beyond primacy in a concrete policy sense that isn’t a grammar and an idiom that these national security state people can actually comprehend because we needed that in 2020 on those campaigns and we didn’t have it.

[00:37:07] And then the result was that they were all like, well, primacy. 

[00:37:10] William Lawrence: Yeah. 

[00:37:10] Van Jackson: Yeah. 

[00:37:11] William Lawrence: Maybe I’ll ask one more question about the book while we’re on it. You offer a helpful taxonomy of three common approaches to, let’s say, progressive internationalism. And I think part of this probably targeted at the liberal audience is to suggest that it doesn’t have to be the all or nothing.

[00:37:31] You don’t have to just give in to The most radical articulation of an alternative. There’s actually a lot of very commonsensical, pragmatic approaches that are here to be taken even if one doesn’t believe in, burning down the world order overnight. And some of us do. But the three types that you distinguish are, you say, progressive pragmatism peacemaking And anti hegemonism in which the anti hegemonism is the most radical and stark break from the existing order.

[00:38:03] But the others are, a pragmatic or constructivist sort of approach reformist. Yeah. Could you just lay out those distinctions for our listeners? And then maybe place your own views in the context of those positions, which you say are not, they’re not all mutually exclusive but in some cases they are.

[00:38:23] Van Jackson: Yeah. So, I’m a synthesis of these things. It’s, like I tend to view security as being indivisible ultimately but I’m also pretty clear eyed about that. And so that’s, and I’m also reformist in my sensibilities, even though my analysis is often extremely radical. So I’m dancing across these things.

[00:38:43] And that’s not unusual. Like you don’t, these categories are ideal types or almost like straw man. And that, that has analytical uses, but it’s infrequent that somebody is like purely one or the other, like we’re all, we all contain multitudes kind of thing. But these three sort of schools of thought about how to do a kind of progressive foreign policy, they differ along the lines of what’s your, what do you think is the primary source of insecurity?

[00:39:10] What’s the primary problem, the primary threat thing that needs to be addressed? And then what’s your priority goal in response to that? So all three share a commitment to anti militarism, and that makes it a stark contrast with liberal internationalism, a stark contrast with primacy, right?

[00:39:28] With the status quo. But they all go about it differently. Differently, depending on how they diagnose the world situation, so progressive pragmatism is, it’s a political economy focused way of dealing with the world, redistributing power, exploiting us power for the sake of redistributing it, in essence and trying to close the gap on various forms of inequality, but especially economic inequality.

[00:39:57] Right. So the lodestar is political and economic democracy, and we’re going to have to use us power to get there, right. Including using it in a way that sort of gives some of it up. And so the threat that you’re addressing there is inequality. It’s the, it’s how the global far right and ethno nationalism emerge out of extreme economic.

[00:40:18] Precarity kleptocracy and oligarchy are therefore like deep structural problems that you have to confront with economic statecraft. So that’s the kind of progressive pragmatist line. And then anti hegemonism is what, I think normal leftists would describe as anti imperialism, it’s just, seeing that America itself is an empire, American militarism as the dominant power is the core problem to be resolved. And you’re not going to get peace in the world without addressing them. And there are rivals in the world. There are some bad guys in the world, but you cannot view them as being apart from the dominant power.

[00:40:59] Military power in the world who goes around self reinforcing, self producing these, the problems, self generating the problems that we have to then confront over and over. So we’ve got to solve American militarism, that means prioritizing American democracy and by doing that, by restraining ourselves, we’re going to unlock, at that point, Democracy and equality, like democracy leads to equality and peace at that point.

[00:41:25] So, if equality first was progressive pragmatism, American democracy first is anti hegemonism. And then the peacemakers, it’s the thinking of the new social movements and some, to some extent, the new left. But it’s like being the change or whatever, like it’s prefigurative logic.

[00:41:44] You want peace in the world. You gotta act peacefully, right? You have to embrace that, that security is indivisible. You can’t sacrifice others in order to preserve yourself. That’s a self defeating thing. You can’t play balance of power games, right? You’re not going to achieve something called national security, quote unquote, if you don’t, if you’re not able to achieve human security.

[00:42:07] Right? So that’s the kind of the peacemakers way. And the belief or the assumption is that if you do that, you can then, by achieving peace, you can then unlock democracy and equality. So democracy, equality, and peace are these three goals that everyone kind of shares. But if you rack and stack them in different ways it, Leads to different approaches to foreign policy.

[00:42:31] William Lawrence: Yeah, I spoke about this a little bit with Toby. It seems to me that the anti hegemonism or we would more commonly just say anti imperialism is the most developed and solidified tendency at the level of grassroots social movements In on the left in the u. s, especially Now, in the moment where everyone is protesting the genocide in Gaza, that tendency has really come forward in a big way.

[00:43:05] And although I think you would say you would probably point out that, some of these other ideas around. Progressive pragmatism and peacemaking were pretty well developed on like the Sanders and Warren campaigns. And there are, there’s no shortage of ideas in this area. And there’s actually a lot of people who are of this tendency Toby, who I just had on the show and a number of others it feels that they have less purchase or less solidity at the level of like grassroots social movements, and they haven’t been, it hasn’t necessarily solidified in a way that can like, really reflect the interests on an ongoing basis of a, of an organized constituency at the grassroots in the U S would you agree with that assessment?

[00:43:47] Any observations you have on that? 

[00:43:51] Van Jackson: Yeah, I think that’s partially because, anti geminism or anti imperialism has a pretty, it’s very confrontational with American militarism and the other approaches. They are, or maybe it’s like antagonistic toward American militarism. Right. So the other approaches also seek to bridle American militarism.

[00:44:13] It’s like more halfway solutions or like it’s technocratic. Fixes. It’s having to imagine that one was 

[00:44:19] William Lawrence: actually had some power in the U. S. State rather than just like, which, yeah, we could argue about how easy that is, but rather than railing against it or suggesting that it should like the best thing it could do, what would be to implode?

[00:44:34] Van Jackson: Yes. And so the reason, one of the reasons why I think the book still, even though it’s liberal facing, I think it’s useful for the left is because Any version that’s of this, that’s an alternative to the status quo is a foreign policy that is basically restraint based. And that’s something that we need to do because restraint based means bridling militarism.

[00:44:55] And the reason that’s so important, no matter which version you cash out, is that’s the terrain on which all of our different democratic projects, like our struggle for political and economic democracy. Okay. In America and abroad, but in America, especially it is suffocated by the national security state.

[00:45:18] It is suffocated by our foreign policy. And the only way that we’re going to have a real fighting chance, and we’re seeing that. Like, why does AIPAC have entry into American politics? What’s destroying Biden’s electoral chances right now? It’s foreign policy. Right? And so, it’s, foreign policy is the thing that strangles our movements, and we are we struggle to confront it in any kind of systematic way.

[00:45:44] We can only confront it during discrete events of emergency, or re excruciatingly bad judgment in certain moments. But so we need to fix the terrain or tilt the terrain so that it’s more accommodating to our struggles for political and economic democracy. Tilting that terrain means bridling militarism in any way possible.

[00:46:06] And there’s many ways to slice that, that salami or whatever. Bad metaphor. There’s many ways to go about that. And so being in favor of any version of restraint could be productive insofar as it creates a more permissive environment for us to struggle, 

[00:46:24] William Lawrence: yeah, this really goes to the question of, and then we’ll move off this point, but it goes to the question of whether there’s an accommodation or a good enough path forward that really does span from liberalism to the, Revolutionary socialist left.

[00:46:39] I really hope that there are ears to hear in the liberal establishment, the kinds of arguments you’re making, because I don’t know if the socialists are going to be able to muster the kind of political force by themselves to then enact a policy of. After having taken command of the of the U.

[00:46:59] S. state, I find it much more plausible that the trend on the left will continue to move in an anti hegemonist direction and really just an out and out revolutionary anti statist. It’s. not exactly anti status, a purely anti systemic revolutionary type socialist movement. Unless somehow we can figure out how to deliver the goods to the American people in a way which like shifts the sentiment and the vibe towards a belief that we’re headed on the right track rather than the wrong track and improves the economic conditions, which also, as you say, requires a different stance to foreign policy.

[00:47:41] Which would require some of the, more reformist liberals and reformist socialists who have been able to get inside a government to figure out a way forward on this stuff. If that set doesn’t figure out how to take up some of these ideas, I think that, We’re going to be in a world of trouble.

[00:48:01] Van Jackson: Yeah, totally. So there needs to be more thinking about the question, even though it seems like a very impossibly remote prospect right now, but the question of the day after, there’s a socialist takeover. Of the Democratic Party or the presidency or of the power of the state by whatever means, ideally democratic means.

[00:48:23] But like the day after that happens, what do you do with the power of the state, man? What’s the agenda? What’s the theory of security there? Right? There needs to be more thinking about that, and the Grand Strategies of the Left book has some ideas to pull from in that respect. But in the meantime, that’s a very remote thing, that’s imagined futures shit. In the meantime, there is the question about what is to be done if you’re the ruling class. If you’re the national security state right now, what do you do with American power? And that everybody who’s in the ruling class is socialized to this whole primacy construct.

[00:49:06] And that’s a problem and they think of themselves as open minded and being liberal means that you have, in principle, some level of tolerance for diversity of thought, even though in practice, they’re pretty fucking closed off. The fact that there’s a foothold there. In principle means that there’s a way to raise consciousness, pointing out contradictions, how do we close the, this was my own thing, like, how do you close the gap between how we were raised to believe certain things like genocide is bad, and then squaring that, reconciling that with how we actually exist in the world, it’s not acceptable.

[00:49:46] To raise a generation of idealists and then they grow up and you tell them each shit, you’re going to be economically insecure the rest of your life. You’re never going to retire. And you might have to die in a nuclear war, like that’s, and we’re going to genocide everybody in the name of yours, imperial mode of living.

[00:50:03] That’s a fuck. This is the bargain that we’ve been handed. It feels so that there’s, if we can start to introduce that recognition into. People in the national security state. Help them see alternatives, help them see the contradictions. We might get traction in some places, like they’re well intentioned a lot of them.

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[00:51:29] William Lawrence: Give me the real talk about how likely obviously this is part of the project that you’re embarking on because you write in a way which is, you face the left, but you also do, as you said, face the people, who are still inside the establishment you write that. In direction, in that direction, how likely do you think the prospects are of getting some traction in those circles?

[00:51:50] How bad we’ll have to get in Gaza? How bad we’ll have to get in our posture with China? Will it be? Do we have to actually have this war with China before people realize that this is not the way? Or is there a chance of some of those people who are on the inside actually getting the memo and being able to steer in a different direction?

[00:52:09] Does it require having a progressive president? Like actually win and get over the top in 2028, someone who would be in a Bernie or Warren like posture and have the kind of people that they had working from them. What is it going to take? How likely is it? Because I think this is something that those of us who are primarily on the outside organizing the movements in the streets and the, and whatnot, we need to have a sense of of how likely it is to be able to find willing collaborators, or at least people to take up some of these ideas on the inside, or if there is actually no hope and we have to just go over the top of the whole thing.

[00:52:42] Van Jackson: I wouldn’t say there’s no hope, but it’s not looking good. Like I was debating with a friend yesterday, not yesterday, last week. And he had been one of the authors of the inflation reduction act. And there were many hands in that cookie jar, but he was one of them. And he was basically like, he spends a lot of time with the Biden folks.

[00:53:01] And his conclusion was more or less we’ve got the only way that like this foreign policy establishment is going to change its ideas or be receptive to real alternatives is if there’s a fucking catastrophic, fake. And the only catastrophic event that we can imagine really is war with China, and that’s a war that basically just ends everything.

[00:53:26] So, it, or it would be very hard to have it and not have it end everything. So he was pretty grim. I wasn’t that pessimistic, but I’m definitely not optimistic because I know that there are abolitionists. In the Biden administration, but I also know like in, in people who identify as like social Democrats and progressives and these are like my people.

[00:53:49] But they are vastly outnumbered, and they’re in the lower half of the hierarchy. So like they’re all new gen younger entries, like they’re not the ones wielding power. They’re the ones staffing the people wielding power. And so like they’re in a, in, like salting the workplace kind of sense.

[00:54:07] There are people on the inside who are totally aghast at all this shit. They cannot believe this, and they’re even becoming more intellectually radicalized because of everything that we’re doing and the contradictions. But they’re trying to operate within a system. They don’t have the power. It’s the older generation that has the power.

[00:54:28] And the older generation, as we know, is going to hold on for every second they can until they can’t no more. And then the question is, what does the next generation do? So like there on the margins, there’s little changes that can happen. And those little changes can make the world marginally more accommodating to our other political struggles, organizing enough and movements.

[00:54:51] But the change is not going to come from the center. It’s not going to come from the national security state, like That would be insane to expect, and the best intermediate thing would be, would have been like Bernie wins in 2020 or maybe Warren wins depending on the direction, yeah. 

[00:55:07] William Lawrence: Okay. Well, I’d like to ask just a couple of questions before we wrap that are like, I guess just common objections I hear from friends of mine, people I talk to when you try to challenge some of these assumptions around primacy, and they really center around China, which is the threat to primacy.

[00:55:24] And the first one is about Taiwan. My friends raise this when we’re on the subject, some of them progressive, some of them liberal. China’s publicly stated intentions are to fully reintegrate with Taiwan by force, if necessary. China views Taiwan as. Part of China and its reintegration as the long awaited conclusion of the Chinese revolutionary civil war.

[00:55:50] I actually lived in China for six months when I was fourteen years old and I can attest that they’re very serious about this. Like the map, to, Taiwan is on the map and it’s part of China and you better not get confused about that. So, so this is a real thing by relinquishing U.

[00:56:04] S. primacy in the Taiwan Strait the U. S. would be admitting its inability to prevent a hostile Chinese takeover of Taiwan. And wouldn’t that be a bad thing? 

[00:56:16] Van Jackson: Yeah. So, I spend I’ve spent so much time in the last 10 years of my life on this question. China insists on unification with Taiwan, but.

[00:56:27] Without, as you say, it is a very real thing, but without specifying how or on what timeline or what it’s supposed to look like, right? So unification could be a visionary distant thing. That’s far off in which case it’s a kind of load star, but. In a practical sense, there’s no, real movement, or it could be something that the CCP wants to happen, peacefully and amicably.

[00:56:52] And obviously they would prefer not to go to war. It might even be like a symbolic thing rather than a legal thing, like it’s, TBD, it’s all TBD. And the CCP has not laid out any kind of action plan that would clarify this, right? And unification by force is something Beijing has been very clear about.

[00:57:14] It would be very clear that it would happen if Taiwan declares de jure independence. And that could happen. There, there’s little murmurings of in that direction, right? But that’s not when, where we’re at now. And that’s not where we’ve been. For the past decades, having said that if China invaded and if we decided to defend Taiwan, it means that we are willing to risk nuclear war over this issue.

[00:57:42] And something that’s really important to understand is that the U S doesn’t have, we’re not in a position to relinquish primacy in the Taiwan Strait. We lost that a long time ago, like over a decade ago, the U. S. doesn’t even have primacy in Asia anymore. It’s not the leading economic power in Asia by almost any measure, even though at a global scale, America is the kind of dominant economic power.

[00:58:07] And even though America has military superiority. In most parts of the world and even most parts of Asia, it doesn’t have it in the Taiwan Strait. The balance of forces in that particular geography, it’s favored China since about 2010. We’ve known that it’s favored China since about 2010, I should say.

[00:58:27] And it overwhelmingly favors China now, basically no matter what we do. And that’s why there’s really no military solution to a political problem. So if we pursue primacy, Anyway, if we try to overmatch China 180 kilometers off of its own coastline, anyway, we’re not just accepting a bloodbath, we’re accepting nuclear war.

[00:58:52] Because the only way that we can have a military victory in Taiwan is by launching a lot of missiles at the Chinese mainland. Military targets, critical infrastructure. You name it. And there’s no reason to expect that you can hit a nuclear power with somewhere between dozens and hundreds of missiles and that they not escalate to nuclear use, right?

[00:59:17] In that scenario, which is the only scenario where we can quote unquote win. Militarily is a scenario where China has every incentive to go nuclear. And so the issue here is that we’re facing an unfavorable balance of power in the straight. And because it’s an issue of geography and not military strategy, we cannot overcome it with bombs and bullets, right?

[00:59:41] So given that we should be doing everything in our power that doesn’t sacrifice Taiwan’s fate to avoid war with China. about Taiwan, right? If China invaded, I think we owe Taiwan some measure of defense and support, but it’s very open ended what that should look like, because again, like I said, I believe security is indivisible, and that means that sacrificing others is a counterproductive way of trying to secure yourself.

[01:00:10] And the greater share of our effort should not be optimizing for a literally unwinnable war. It should be on focused on preventing that war, minimizing its chances. And to that end, the 40 plus year detente that we had with China was working pretty well until we decided that it wasn’t until we threw it out in 2015, 2016.

[01:00:33] Right? So we need to be willing to explore the basis for a new detente program. With China, because that’s the only way we can avoid making Taiwan’s geopolitical situation worse. And are we going to be able to do that and think about a new detente from a position of primacy? No, we are not, so it’s all connected.

[01:00:54] William Lawrence: This is like serenity prayer stuff, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Like the proximity of Taiwan to China. Yeah, the wisdom to know what to do instead. So I want to ask another question about China. There’s a big frame out there that the Biden administration would really love for us to take up that sees this as a conflict between a democracy and an autocracy.

[01:01:21] China has a bad human rights record with its treatment of ethnic minorities in certain areas. Xinjiang and Tibet, arguably as bad as the U. S. as human rights record it doesn’t have a free speech according to our standards. Shouldn’t we want a democracy to be the prime power in the world rather than relinquishing that title to an authoritarian party?

[01:01:44] Party state. This is another argument that I hear people make. Now we could point out how this is obviously hypocritical coming from the Biden administration and from the U S in general, it’s celebration of democracy has always been self serving. And we always we have tons of alliances with dictatorships around the world in the Saudi Arabia, what would you say about it specifically in the context of of the conflict with China?

[01:02:06] Van Jackson: Yeah, there’s two questions here, I think. One is about Chinese human rights abuses in its periphery, which is a real problem, and it’s bound up in Chinese ethno nationalism Chinese settler colonial capitalism even, and it exploits China, the CCP exploits places like Xinjiang In the style of old school empires, for China, those abuses though, are downstream of its ethno nationalism and its ethno nationalism is the CCP’s alternative source of legitimacy under a crisis of capital accumulation, its growth rates are falling and that’s important because economic growth has been the main source of CCP legitimacy since the 1980s as its growth wanes, its ethno nationalism becomes a more important source of regime legitimacy.

[01:02:53] And so exploitation of non Han Chinese, it, whether it’s Xinjiang or Tibet or wherever in the periphery, that’s going to become more salient for the CCP. It’s going to be something they’re going to do more as It has to tilt toward or rely on exploiting ethno nationalism to keep the project together, right?

[01:03:13] But the other issue is about who rules the world, we should not want China to rule the world. We shouldn’t want anybody to rule the world. Yeah. It’s do you want a more diverse ruling class or do you want no ruling class? So we should not want China to rule the world, but there’s a false frame here, right?

[01:03:33] Preventing Chinese hegemony does not require our hegemony. That’s a beltway take. That’s a beltway assumption, right? It’s a Steve Bannon assumption, in fact. It’s well, we have to have primacy, because if we don’t, then others will dominate. And it’s no, what the fuck are you talking about? That’s illogical the, no.

[01:03:51] And so it’s not clear at all, though, That China wants to dominate the world that’s our thing, but even if it does want to dominate the world at some point, and we cannot rule that out, that possibility out, China cannot achieve the kind of domination that keeps a lot of us up at night. Why not? Because China’s material power, This is why this is the important of having an analysis, right?

[01:04:14] China’s material power comes from the paradoxical position it occupies within the capitalist world system. It’s a semi peripheral country. China cannot airbrush out. It is an exploiter and exploit head in a world system of unequal exchange, right? China cannot airbrush out the United States without undercutting its own power because the core of our world system.

[01:04:38] Is overwhelmingly the U S like it’s a more multipolar world, but within that multipolar world, we’re still the first among unequals. So imagining that China could take over the world or displace the US is to imagine China defying the realities of how power is structured. If you think about it, China’s ability to economically coerce others, its ability to pour resources.

[01:05:03] Into the PLA, which we find so scary. It’s ability to finance infrastructure development in other countries, which we also find so scary. All of this is dependent on it occupying a particular position in Asian political economy, Asian and global production networks. It has to have markets that can absorb its surplus capital, absorb its surplus labor, absorb its overproduction of finished goods, without which it can’t do shit.

[01:05:31] It’s not a superpower. At all, it’s nothing if it can’t do those things, and so for the foreseeable future, China’s power depends on continuing access to the U S market and to Asian and financial trade architecture. And so China is a problem, but it’s a problem within a world system that has scaffolded disproportionately around our preferences.

[01:05:54] China is not a free floating bad guy. It, if China does not stand outside world order, threatening civilization and like throwing rocks at it, it’s part of it and it mostly accepts it, and I don’t want to go off on a tangent, but like the problem of dual decline might be the actual geopolitical problem of our era.

[01:06:15] There are growing signs that both China and the U S are in relative decline and we don’t really have a good narrative for what that’s supposed to look like, but it sure as hell not American hegemony or Chinese hegemony. 

[01:06:27] William Lawrence: And China actually has an incentive. I’ve read other takes that China has a real incentive, arguably even more than the US to want to seek peace because it is a export exporting power.

[01:06:39] It relies on the ability to have, the flow of commerce on the seas worldwide, which would be one of the first things to break down is already breaking down, in the Red Sea if we end up in a more conflictual world. They have every reason to want a to want peace and to be able to, buy more time to reconfigure their sort of economic system onto a more stable footing.

[01:07:04] Now that they’re experiencing this decline, but entering a war, more warlike posture just doesn’t seem like something that China has an incentive to do, it really is the U S that’s driving that kind of tendency. 

[01:07:17] Van Jackson: Yeah. And there’s, it’s not. It doesn’t appear that they’re mobilizing for war in the way that the U.

[01:07:23] S. national security state insists it is, like Xi Jinping keeps proving over and he keeps giving speech after speech where he’s making the economy the priority, Chinese economic development a priority, trying to you. Resolve or fix some of the contradictions and it’s like it is facing its own sort of slow burning crisis of capital accumulation, and so managing that is the most important priority for China.

[01:07:49] And so if that’s the five meter target. Unification with Taiwan is the hundred meter target unless circumstances force them to Accelerate that timeline or whatever, you know So if that’s the case, then we should be we have a lot of margin to manage this more You know, prudently, 

[01:08:07] William Lawrence: I had a series of pretty heated debates with a friend of mine who was coming from from a pretty, I think, just like Sinophobic Reddit ingesting perspective, read too much Reddit, but the thing that I said in the end that I think actually well, she couldn’t really answer this was just think about this.

[01:08:24] Given everything we know, you don’t have to love any of these countries or their leaders, but what is more dangerous to the world? A rising China or a decline in United States, because we already know what MAGA means. We already know what a decline in United States looks like. And we know what Americans look like when they are when they perceive themselves to be threatened, they get ugly and violent.

[01:08:47] And MAGA has proven to us better than ever. But on a global stage that can become a bipartisan phenomenon. Okay. So let’s move on. Just the last question, we got to wrap in 10 minutes or so, but we are just, if not spiraling great power conflict between the U S and China, and If not the sort of magical reset to 1995 which seems impossible, which would be the reinstatement of permanent U.

[01:09:16] S. hegemony and primacy. What is the new stable state at which you could envision the international order coming to rest? We’re in transition and we’re in chaos. On the other side of that, there will be some new stability achieved. Eventually, what should we be imagining and aiming for? 

[01:09:39] Van Jackson: Yeah. So the world is becoming more multipolar but the distribution of power in the international system does not determine the kind of political order that emerges, right?

[01:09:49] Those are two separate things. So we can imagine oligarchic political orders under multipolarity where capital calls the shots. Right. Power is diffuse, but it’s still capital calling the shots. What seems to be emerging now is an ethno nationalist political order under multipolarity. And that order largely serves the interests of some sections of capital at the expense of others.

[01:10:13] And it’s also possible that’s pretty bleak, but it’s possible to have a liberatory multipolar order, right? We’re very long way from that. And there hasn’t. Been much work on what a liberatory multipolar world would look like. Maybe something along the lines of the NIO and IEO is like the closest we get from the cold war, new international economic order.

[01:10:35] A lot of that stuff was half baked. And I say that as someone who thinks it’s probably the best model we’ve got. So the world that we want to go to needs to be compatible. with multipolarity. And it’s just a question of how we get there. And that’s a question of like coalitions and how we relate to the world and build power and relate to the national security state, even so long as it exists.

[01:11:01] William Lawrence: So how do we then go about building power? What do you think is the task for us in the U. S.? What are the domestic constituencies that You think can be mobilized to pursue this in the U. S. Obviously more and more people already are in some sense. And who are the key allies abroad that you think us in the U.

[01:11:22] S. Ought to be connecting with and working with? 

[01:11:27] Van Jackson: So I think justice instability are related, although in international relations, those that relationship has not been established in a just global order requires redistributions of power. Between capital and labor, but also among nations. And that means the U S has to relate to the world in a way that doesn’t require exclusion and domination, which means it has to abandon primacy which is totally incompatible with the realities of our current conjuncture.

[01:11:58] The U S has to transcend an economy rooted in military Keynesianism. And there’s a lot of literature about how to do. A peace conversion of the economy so that workers benefit from that conversion process and they’re not harmed by it, and the U. S. has to be willing to explore the trade space of a new detente with China, something like a green bargain that we talked about earlier.

[01:12:19] Before, so who’s the power block for that? Who do we work with electorally? It’s, we gotta be all in on justice Democrats, right? Like they’re the ones building a social democratic block within the democratic party and it’s American social Democrats who are going to consistently advocate against militarism, against primacy for the best of the green new deal that got stripped out of the final version.

[01:12:43] Right. And getting our foreign policy under control is. I think literally a prerequisite to social democracy in the U. S. And part of this Gaza brings it into sharp relief, but it’s the demands of the national security state that Republicans use as a wedge and centrist Democrats use as a wedge to basically hollow out political and economic democracy every time.

[01:13:08] Another constituency, let’s see. It’s just no brainer is like the intersectional working class, I don’t have any magical solution here, but it’s really important that organized labor doesn’t go reactionary, but also doesn’t make the AFL style compromises with the national security state that it did in the 50s, that was very self defeating and it’s going to be self defeating now too.

[01:13:31] So, We have to figure out a way to appeal to labor and to tamp down the reactionary tendencies. And that’s just like obvious, and then internationally, we have to find progressive groups on the ground around the world and specifically foreign unions. So the goal of our economic statecraft ought to be Not about sanctions and punishment, which is the entirety of it now, but it should be about trying to increase the living standards and the economic security for workers around the world, because that’s literally the best way to improve economic conditions for Americas.

[01:14:09] That evens the playing field, right? It reverses the race to the bottom that’s been going on for workers the past 50 years. And so raising the visibility of foreign unions and understanding what their demands are and their needs are and showing solidarity in that project. That’s really crucial, but it’s not just a labor internationalism that’s important.

[01:14:30] There are other progressive groups and progressive legislators that exist in other countries, and I’ve been trying to track this more. Progressive policy organizations and think tanks, right? There’s an intellectual cadre who design and advocate for political and economic democracy in these various countries, and there’s a level of where cross border coordination of ideas is possible and could make a difference.

[01:14:55] And so the Progressive International is one version of that maybe. But the Center for International Policy in D. C., where I’m affiliated, is also starting to do this. And I think that’s important work to do as well. So, foreign unions, foreign progressive legislators, justice Democrats, American labor progressive think tanks and policy institutions abroad, and then some section of capital.

[01:15:18] This is the controversial part, to close this out. In America especially, you probably have to make your peace with some section of capital to get somewhere. And in our current conjuncture, the only section of capital that’s pro peace and against great power rivalry is the firms who have large overseas supply chains and financial interests abroad.

[01:15:39] So if they’re advocating against militarism and anti militarism is a prerequisite for social democracy, then there’s something to explore there. I don’t want to defend these guys, but we have to think critically. In a realist way about this, yeah. 

[01:15:54] William Lawrence: No, I’m gonna have to sit with that one.

[01:15:56] Because when we were doing our early strategy on the Green New Deal, we were in our hard nosed realistic way. We said, well, well, they’ll have to be some sort of Concord with with green capital. We’re not going to have the anti capitalist revolution in the next five years.

[01:16:11] And so we anticipated on our strategy charts that there would be some segment of green capital that would be with our program. And then there would, be a segment of fossil capital against it. Now I’ve found that has it’s been Well, it’s been incredibly bitter in practice to see the way that green capital has in fact of course, to embrace the the inflation reduction act and by nomics and not every element.

[01:16:34] Of that has been bad. But the extent to which they have become willing partners in this kind of economic nationalism, the parts of it, which are very bad has been a very bitter pill indeed. So I would want to role play that out a little bit more the next go around. It’s worth thinking through exactly how it will fall out.

[01:16:53] Van Jackson: Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. 

[01:16:55] William Lawrence: Well, Van, you’ve given us some really powerful and ambitious marching orders here. I appreciate the time for this conversation and I really encourage everybody to, subscribe to the undiplomatic newsletter on sub stack and listen to the podcast. Obviously Van really knows his stuff here and I don’t think there’s anybody doing it quite like him, especially with the knowledge you have of the the inside of the blob and the foreign policy circuit your ability to translate some of that and then turn it into a, a dialogue with people on the organized left is really impressive.

[01:17:29] And I’m looking forward to continuing the conversation. 

[01:17:32] Van Jackson: Thanks so much. This was such a generative conversation. Like I’ll be noodling with this for a long time, I think. 

[01:17:38] William Lawrence: Awesome. Thanks again, folks. Come back next week. We’ll have another conversation like this one. This podcast is written and hosted by me, William Lawrence.

[01:17:48] Our producer is Josh Elstro, and it is published by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights. You can help support this show and others like it by becoming a subscriber of Convergence at convergencemag. com slash donate. Standard subscriptions start at 10 and really help support the sustainabilities of shows like this one. One time donations of any amount are welcome there as well. You can find a direct link to donate or subscribe in the show notes. This has been The Hegemonicon. Thanks for listening and let’s talk again soon.