The Un-Diplomatic Podcast

AOC announces that she opposes arming Israel in any way--a welcome shift. What makes the Iran war a class war that takes money from every worker in the world. NATO has many problems, but its biggest is the United States. What makes the world post-hegemonic; new signs that the United States repudiates its own form status as global hegemon. Why slaughter is not a strategy--the Trump administration admits that bombing targets (not opening the Strait of Hormuz) is its only aim. Ed Luce of the Financial Times has a chat with Trump about Iran and what comes next. 

While America's war in Iran slides into higher casualties and greater costs, most of the world remains distracted from America's illegal blockade of Cuba--an act of war. Why the oil crisis is going to fuel a food crisis, which is going to sow revolutionary conditions around the world. How imperialism does and doesn't help explain the US bombing a dairy farm in Ecuador. Pete Hegseth's pastor praying for the death of Texas senate candidate James Talarico signals a wave of far right violence that will confront the victories of left populist democrats in 2026 and 2028. Tracking the latest in the...

Free episode crossover with The Bang-Bang Podcast! You might know Morgan Spector as the critically acclaimed leading man in The Gilded Age and The Plot Against America. Or for his appearances in Boardwalk Empire, Suits, Homeland, How to Make It In America (one of Van’s favorites), or even as a producer on The Big Scary “S” Word. What you might not know is that Morgan is both an impressive critic of policy and an advocate for democratic socialism.

We invited Morgan on to talk about Independence Day (1996), a delicious conversation that’s next in our queue. But we a...

Why the Iran war is creating a global financial crisis. Why China doesn't want global hegemony, but if it did, now is the best time imaginable. Signs of American hegemonic decline. And Joe Kent's resignation from the Trump administration and how to read it in light of anti-semitism. Van Jackson and Matt Duss chopping up all that and more in this episode.

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What is the US shortage of standoff weapons? What's Iran's strategy? Why are missile defense systems moving from South Korea to the Middle East? And why is it wrong to believe that war with Iran comes at the expense of war with China? Can the US even defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion? In this episode live from the Kapiti Coast, Dr. Van Jackson analyzes the latest in the US and Israeli war with Iran and what it means for the balance of power in Asia.

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What is techno-industrialism, who benefits from it, and what does it mean for the working class? Maddy Crowell joins Julia Gledhill on the podcast to discuss her new article in Harper’s Magazine, in which she explores the effort to reindustrialize the United States through rearmament. 

Read “The Plot to Save America,” here: https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/the-plot-to-save-america-maddy-crowell-reindustrialization-weapons-manufacturing/ 

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In this episode live on location in the Kapiti Coast (the background noise is the ocean), Dr. Van Jackson explains five truths about war with Iran that account for why the war happened, who benefits from it, and what comes next. 

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As the Trump administration prepares for war with Iran, why does it suddenly care about manufacturing consent? Inside the US military's munitions shortfall and what it says about capitalism, oligarchy, and the US relationship with war. War games with artificial intelligence say chatbots choose escalation to nuclear war 95% of the time. What's at stake in Anthropic's fight with the Pentagon, and why it's not as it seems. The Democratic Party--and American democracy--has a Palantir problem. Also this episode: why two senior officers have been purged from the Joint Staff. Dr. Van Jackson breaks all that down and more. 

What did AOC reveal about her foreign policy vision during her trip to Germany and the Munich Security Conference? Why is the US about to illegally attack Iran, again? Proof from the New York Times that the Democratic Party as we know it is in crisis. And what we can learn about tech-worker backlash against AI and Anthropic's fight with the Pentagon. 

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How did opposition to the Iraq War become the largest peace movement in recorded history? Why is the world ripe for a new generation of peace activism? And why is it so important to diagnose militarism as a primary cause of global insecurity today? Dr. David Cortright--a legendary peace activist and peace scholar--joins the pod to offer an oral history of the global peace movement in the context of his career, from protesting the Vietnam War to running SANE (The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy) and co-founding Win Without War. 

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Recorded on location in the wilds of New Zealand’s Kapiti Coast. Why is America declining? Grand strategists, pundits, and scholars have been debating the best label for US foreign policy during the Trump presidency: illiberal hegemony; neo-royalism; reactionary nationalism; predatory hegemony. But none of these labels offer an account of themselves. Why is the US engaged in predatory behavior abroad? Why has American hegemony ended? The answer can be found in imperialism and its causes. A crisis of capitalism is accelerating imperial decline, which is birthing what you might call the Age of Primitive Accumulation. Geopolitics has fundamentally ch...

How the Pentagon is facilitating the rapid expansion "ghost network" concentration camps in America. Why arms control is dying and what to make of the New START Treaty's expiration. Jeff Bezos has effectively killed The Washington Post--what's next? Why neoconsevative foreign policy hawks still run Washington. And the importance of Gary Stevenson's story in The Trading Game for understanding the decline of empire. Van Jackson, Julia Gledhill, and Matt Duss cover all that and more in the latest episode. 

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The US State Department has been coordinating far right separatists in Alberta--the imperialism threat to Canada is real. Denmark's debt weapon and the EU's anti-coercion instrument got Trump to temporarily back off of invading Greenland. Why is the fantasy of returning industrial manufacturing so important to the American far right (and some progressives)? The confession of a Biden administration adviser to supporting war crimes in Gaza. And just how bloody is drone warfare? New data from the Russia-Ukraine war reveals something on the order of World War I, with very little to show for it in terms of territorial...

Free crossover episode with The Bang-Bang Podcast! Do US troops have a threshold for the kind of unlawful order they’re unwilling to follow? If Venezuela wasn’t a breaking point, is Greenland? Can the US have mid-term elections under martial law? Will troops fire on fellow Americans if ordered? And why is the permanent war economy at the root of everything from economic insecurity to America’s imperial boomerang in the form of ICE, National Guard deployments, and militarized policing?

In this urgent behind-the-scenes episode, guest Jeremy Wattles joins Van Jackson and Lyle Jeremy Rubin to talk a...

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave the most important speech about international relations in 50 years. In this episode, Dr. Van Jackson and guest Dr. Seva Gunitsky sit down to dissect Carney's speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. They discuss the many shades of realism in international relations, what it means to acknowledge the contradictions of the "rules-based international order," and where the world goes now that American hegemony is officially over. 

Subscribe to Seva's newsletter: https://hegemon.substack.com 

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Are protests in Iran a prelude to revolution? The root causes of Iranian unrest are economic. Why Joseph Stiglitz thinks it’s time to isolate and contain the United States. Why Silicon Valley’s network-state advocates have fixated on taking over Greenland, and why the geopolitics of the network state could lead to World War III. The case for nationalizing the defense industry and taking the profits out of war. And why Trump wants a $1.5 trillion-dollar war machine, and why Dr. Van Jackson predicted he would. 

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Dr. Van Jackson tackling a host of dark issues in this episode. How to explain US imperialism in Venezuela. NATO's existential trouble and America's threat to annex Greenland. The economics of American empire. How the Trump administration quietly killed the last initiative for a progressive global order. And the struggle against A.I. data centers. 

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A special holiday crossover with The Bang-Bang Podcast! Van Jackson and Lyle Rubin are joined by the preeminent nuclear scholar Scott Sagan to discuss A House of Dynamite, the 2025 political thriller that imagines nuclear catastrophe not as spectacle or obvious madness, but as an orderly sequence of decisions made under crushing time pressure. Structured as interlocking vignettes rather than a single command-room drama, the film moves between the White House, STRATCOM, missile defense sites, continuity bunkers, and civilian spaces, sketching a system that largely works as designed and still produces annihilation.

The film’s opening establishes its go...

Free crossover episode with the American Prestige Podcast! Julia Gledhill and Van Jackson joined Daniel Bessner and Derek Davison to breakdown the Trump administration’s newly released National Security Strategy. They discuss how the document leans on civilizational framing, portrays competition as existential conflict, omits diplomacy and institutions in favor of coercion and deal-making, and deemphasizes democracy promotion. They also touch on the strategy’s treatment of Europe and Latin America, its assumptions about American power, and what the new NSS suggests about the direction of U.S. foreign policy.

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Free crossover episode with The Jacob Shapiro Podcast! It's a strategy of primitive accumulation masquerading as a culture warrior grand strategy. It's doing white Christian nationalism as foreign policy, imperialism in Latin America, far-right revolution in Europe. And what about China? In this crossover episode between The Un-Diplomatic Podcast and The Jacob Shapiro Podcast, Dr. Van Jackson--a former national security strategist--explains the significance of the Trump administration's new National Security Strategy and what it means for the world. 

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Free episode crossover with The Bang-Bang Podcast! Van Jackson and Lyle Rubin are joined by returning guest Sam Carliner to take on Marines, Netflix’s new 250th-anniversary docuseries, an unmistakable propaganda piece (it’s literally featured on the official Marine Corps website) that nonetheless reveals more candor than the institution intended. Directed by Chelsea Yarnell, whose style veers into Riefenstahl-lite, the series moves through the familiar mythology: Marines as the “meanest, baddest motherfuckers,” war as manhood, China as the next “bloody” proving ground. But between the clichés, something truer keeps slipping out.

The Marines themselves come across not as...

Free episode cross-over! Van Jackson appeared as a guest on Davis Ellison’s Official Positions podcast. They talk about how Van became a scholar, why he left Washington for New Zealand, the social realities of being a foreign policy wonk, the dark side of life in rich countries, what strategic studies ought to be, and how Davis himself went from being NATO analyst to being a NATO critic. 

Check out Official Positions: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/official-positions/id1798238454

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Why regime-change war with Venezuela is about drugs. And cartels. And immigration. And resource exploitation. And because it will be good for inflation. And because uranium to all of the world’s bad guys. What the fuck!? Things are shaping up like a choose-your-own adventure story that fails to learn from the Iraq War. What is the Ukraine peace plan and why is it destined to fail in its current form? The opportunity and threat of national-security democrats like Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly, and what it says that Trump is accusing them of sedition. Trump’s effort to brin...

Van Jackson and Julia Gledhill link back up to discuss Bret Stephens' op-ed in the New York Times making the case for overthrowing Maduro in Venezuela...and why it's the Iraq War all over again. How the Democrats are in bed with Palantir and why they need to get out. The G-7 meeting in Canada revealed what can only be called imperialist multilateralism. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio designates Antifa a foreign terrorist organization, which escalates an ongoing fight between rulers and subjects in most countries. 

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In this crossover episode with The Time of Monsters--a podcast of The Nation Magazine--Jeet Heer and Van Jackson discuss the worldmaking of Jeffrey Epstein and the complicity of America's entire ruling class in his crimes, from Larry Summers and Leon Panetta to Trump himself. Thousands of leaked emails reported by DropSite News have revealed something about Jeffrey Epstein that few people realized: He was one of the world's preeminent geopoliticians during the unipolar moment, and that's not a good thing. We now know that Epstein actively promoted the interests of the global far right; worked with Israeli security services...

Who’s afraid of Zohran Mamdani, and why New York newest mayor will lead to Trump escalating his war against Americans. An economic great depression is already hiding in plain sight. The Nazi debate within the Republican Party. Why the Trump administration’s war on Venezuela will expand to Colombia and Mexico. Making sense of Trump’s trip across East Asia as a symptom of hegemonic decline.

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Xi Jinping and Donald Trump just met in South Korea, agreeing to suspend the most acute aspects of economic warfare for 12 months, lowering US tariffs on Chinese goods, and resuming Chinese purchases of US soybeans. But Dr. Van Jackson explains why the inter-imperialist rivalry between China and the US endures, why talk of a G2 is premature, and what needs to be done to address the structural sources of great-power competition. 

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Part II of our crossover episode with The Bang-Bang Podcast! Van and Lyle are joined by Sam Ratner, Policy Director at Win Without War, and Andy Facini, Communications Director at the Council on Strategic Risks, to discuss WarGames, John Badham’s Cold-War techno-thriller that accidentally foresaw the age of algorithmic warfare. What begins as a teenage prank—Matthew Broderick’s David Lightman breaking into what he thinks is a computer game—quickly becomes a meditation on automation, deterrence, and human judgment in systems built to annihilate. Together, the group unpacks how WarGames’ “WOPR” supercomputer prefigures today’s AI decision-making, where machines l...

Free crossover episode with The Bang-Bang Podcast! Van and Lyle are joined by Sam Ratner, Policy Director at Win Without War, and Andy Facini, Communications Director at the Council on Strategic Risks, to discuss WarGames, John Badham’s Cold-War techno-thriller that accidentally foresaw the age of algorithmic warfare.

What begins as a teenage prank—Matthew Broderick’s David Lightman breaking into what he thinks is a computer game—quickly becomes a meditation on automation, deterrence, and human judgment in systems built to annihilate. Together, the group unpacks how WarGames’ “WOPR” supercomputer prefigures today’s AI decision-making, where machines learn t...

The RAND Corporation just cut 11% of staff--which is a further sign of a crisis of capital accumulation. The CIA is maybe rethinking China. The Trump administration is accelerating decoupling from China. Progressives and antiwar organizations send an open letter to Trump about detente with China. Graham Platner's tattoo is getting way too much attention, and also the reason he'll beat Susan Collins. Steve Bannon says Trump will be president in 2028, despite being unconstitutional.

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What it means that the Department of War just revoked the press credentials for more than 100 media outlets. Why the China trade crisis is a self-imposed Cuban Missile Crisis that could nuke the global economy (China has predictable control of critical minerals). Trump's covert action authorization against Venezuela is part of Monroe Doctrine 2.0. Why the criminal charges against Ashley Tellis signal a more perilous age for foreign policy analysts. And what Gaza ceasefire does and does not mean. And why everyone but Matt looks forward to pumpkin-spice latte season. 

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Jamie Merchant, author of Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline, wants you to stop thinking like a policymaker! He joins the pod to talk about a new essay he has in The Brooklyn Rail about the decline and decay of the "progressive managerial state." Van and Jamie also discuss their shared critique of the book Trade Wars Are Class Wars, the contradiction of Trump's tariffs, their mixed evaluation of Adam Tooze, why international relations as a discipline appears to be in terminal decline, the ideological conflicts within MAGA and what it has to do with a crisis of capital...

Pete Hegseth's fat-generals theory of war is a stabbed-in-the-back myth meant to justify brutality. Trump's NSPM-7 is very explicitly a war on anyone who advocates for peace, democracy, and equality. The government shutdown is being used as a war on Democrats and liberal democracy. The Gaza Sumud Flotilla gets targeted by Israel, in violation of international law--why don't modern states protect their citizens anymore? Trump wants to make a soybean deal with China--the makings of a new detente, but with corrupt, elite-serving foundations. 

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Why are both the left and the right opposed to the "liberal international order?" What are different schools of right-wing thought about the world, what makes the global far right a counter-order movement, and what, if anything, does it have in common with progressive foreign policy. Dr. Van Jackson, a scholar of international relations, explains the competing global visions of left and right in this live lecture you don't want to miss. This is part two of a two-part lecture on the politics of global order. 

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What was the "Liberal International Order," and why did people start calling it the "Rules-Based International Order?" Why do experts debate its meaning? What good has it been? How liberal was the Liberal International Order? And why is it over? Dr. Van Jackson, a scholar of international relations, explains in this live lecture you don't want to miss. This is part one of a two-part lecture on the politics of global order. 

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How do territorial disputes in the South China Sea impact biodiversity? Madelyn MacMurray joins the podcast to discuss how militarized fishing fleets deplete fish stocks – and why that matters to the world. 

Read Madelyn’s most recent piece: Militarized Commons: How Territorial Competition is Weaponizing Fisheries and Destroying the South China Sea: https://www.stimson.org/2025/territorial-competition-weaponizing-fisheries-south-china-sea/ 

And check out her team’s most recent report on the same topic, here: Policy Roadmap: Addressing IUU Fishing in Southeast Asia: https://www.stimson.org/2025/policy-roadmap-addressing-iuu-fishing-in-southeast-asia/ 

Follow Madelyn on X, if you’re still there: https://x.c...

Explaining how designating Antifa a terrorist organization and cancelling Jimmy Kimmel are part of the same emergency politics: A primer on securitization theory in the Trump presidency. White nationalist oligarchy is stealing your money and causing a recession: Here's how and why. The US TikTok deal with China could be the model for a new grand bargain, albeit a corrupt one. And the US National Defense Strategy is still targeting China. 

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On Charlie Kirk's horrific assassination and why Ezra Klein's hand-wringing shows that, contrary to his protestations, he in fact embraces some political violence. Trump and Pete Hegseth rename the Department of Defense the Department of War. The Pentagon starts shifting from Indo-Pacific to Asia-Pacific, which has the fingerprints of Elbridge Colby all over it (and I’m not mad at that!). Israel attacks US ally Qatar--what that says about war, expansionism, and revisionist foreign policy. ICE raids a Hyundai-LG factory in Georgia, exposing South Korea to white supremacist statecraft. 

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What is progressive foreign policy and what are its roots? The New Left’s struggles against racism, militarism, and imperialism were the real origins of what we call progressive foreign policy today. In this special oral history episode, I tell the story of progressive foreign policy and where it could be headed. Key moments in that history include:

Opposition to Cold War liberalism;

Advocacy for the Nuclear Freeze Movement in the 1980s;

How Democratic Party foreign policy became so hawkish during the Global War on Terror and the Obama presidency;

The ro...

The real price of Trump's military occupation of Washington, DC. Trump's war on George Soros and Alex Soros is a war on the Democratic Party. US "gray zone" covert action in Greenland is foreign malign influence against Denmark. Should the US state nationalize the defense industry? And MAGA's contradiction on China is not the rift it appears as. 

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