Hello listeners.

Welcome to another episode of the Jacob Shapiro podcast.

Today I am joined by Dr. Van Jackson.

He is an American born scholar of international relations, specializing

in East Asian and Pacific Security.

Um, he is a senior lecturer in international relations at the, at

the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and a senior research

scholar at Security and Context, um, where he is co-director of the

Multipolarity Great Power Competition in the Global South Project.

Uh, he's written.

Several books, um, which you should all, uh, check out.

Uh, his, his, his new one is The Rivalry Peril, how Great Power Competition

Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy.

Um, from 2009 to 2014, he had positions in the Office of the Secretary of

Defense as a strategist and policy advisor focused on the Asia Pacific.

Um, I said this about the Mike Conal episode, and I will say it now too.

Um, if you have come to my podcast to hear only things that you agree with.

Uh, you are in the wrong place.

There are plenty of Ben Shapiros and Rachel Maddows

and other out others out there.

If you just want your own biases confirmed.

I'm here to bring you voices that I think are incredibly smart and give

a different perspective on the world.

Some of you listening to Van Jackson, especially those of you who are Donald

Trump's supporters, or think of yourselves that way, you will react negatively to

some of the things that Van is saying.

You will even maybe at points think that he has Trump derangement syndrome,

although if you stick around for the whole podcast, you'll see that

van is an equal opportunity critic.

He will, he will criticize the left and the Democrats just as

much as he will go after the right.

Uh, and President Donald Trump.

I brought him on because I've been following Van's analysis for over

a decade now and for my money.

He is one of the smartest and most clever commentators that are out there

and has an intellectual purity that very, very few analysts have out there.

I sense no hypocrisy in him.

His thinking is all incredibly consistent.

Even when I disagree with it, it's all extremely sinewy and laid

out, and for that reason, he's.

Somebody that I follow and I would encourage you to follow as well.

You can check out his, uh, podcast un diplomatic.

He's also got a substack under that name if you're interested in following

with him and adding people to your Rolodex that you also disagree with

or who make you think differently.

So I hope you enjoy the episode.

I hope you will open up space to hear a point of view that you probably won't

agree with everything that you hear from.

If you want to tell me how badly you disagreed with things, you can always

send me emails at jacob@jacobshapiro.com.

I'm here, I'm listening, and I try to answer everything that comes in otherwise.

Uh, it is Monday afternoon, July 14th that we're recording.

I have to go get ready for an event, uh, this evening on the

shores of Trout Lake in Wisconsin.

Uh, but I hope you're all keeping well.

Take care of the people that you love.

Cheers, and I will see you out there.

Um, all right, listeners, this is maybe the most beautiful

place I've ever podcasted from.

I just got off a plane.

I'm on Lake Trout in Wisconsin.

Uh, home apparently of the, the Hoag.

Some kind of strange mythical frog crossed with an elephant that was made

up by a local person in the 18 hundreds so that he could use dynamite to, I

don't know, I bought his biography, but, uh, van Jackson is with us Van.

It's really, really nice to welcome you onto the podcast.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Uh, van, I don't know if I'm gonna blow your mind or

not, so I. Uh, my career started at Strat four as a Middle East analyst.

My experience of most people who had anything to do with government, um,

or who were in policy circles in the US government, when they heard Strat

four, they basically thought we were like, if they were nice, it was single a

baseball and usually it was not so nice.

Like, we were like, just like Dantes who didn't do anything.

But you might be.

Surprised to know that there was a coterie of us who loved you at Strat four.

Have always loved you at Strat four, followed you closely when I told, uh,

all, all of us have since left Strat four.

Yes.

But when I told some of those analysts that I had finally got you on the

podcast, they were really excited.

So I'm, I'm really excited to have you here.

I followed you work for a long time and, uh, you were, you were making

waves even maybe when you didn't know it into corners of the intelligence

community, you probably think nothing of.

Wow.

Yeah, my ears were burning, I guess.

Um, look, we could take this lots of distant different directions.

I definitely wanna talk to you about Korea for a while on the back end of this, but I

think we, we started a pretty open level.

Um, we actually, I think your appearance actually dovetails nicely because we

had Mike Al on was our last Oh yeah.

Guest on the podcast.

He was a. Um, Biden era, I don't know, economist economic advisor.

Uh, and now we've, we've got you coming from, uh, sort of the more

strictly foreign policy level.

But I guess just from, you know, we're sitting here, it's July 14th, we'll,

we'll publish this in a couple of days.

We've, we have veered back and forth from Liberation Day to bombing Iran to now

it's Liberation Day again with tariffs.

Um, we're like seven months into the ride, only seven months into the ride.

Um, so I guess I'll just, I'll start with a really broad and open-ended question.

Like how do you assess US power and us place in the world right now

after these seven or eight months?

And how much do you think has changed in these seven or eight months?

Like, I know that the, the speed and the velocity and the volatility has even,

you know, analysts like you and me who do this for a living, feeling both whiplash

and like forms of emotional trauma.

Um.

But like, have, have things meaningfully changed?

Are things that different?

Is this just like an uncouth person who's using the government in the

same way that everybody else did?

He's just like less subtle about it.

Like, I'm, I'm just, I'm curious like where you think we are now that

we've sort of gotten our bearings and, and we're into the summer.

Yeah.

I mean like, like everybody who's smart, I think I'm caught off

guard by how fast everything is.

This, this speed run approach to, you know, everything is, is jarring.

But the velocity, I mean the, the direction of travel, I should

say, is just very predictable.

This is precisely why I was calling out Trump as a fascist very early on.

There's a way in which, it's a reason I ended up in New Zealand as early as 2017.

I made a bet basically with my professional life.

I saw this, I saw this coming in that much of a sense, you know, like

back when it was crazy to, I mean, nobody was picking up and leaving

America, you know what I mean?

Um, and so that this is not unexpected and like I specifically was predicting

war with Iran once I saw who he was appointing and who he was listening

to, because it's, it's an extension of, you know, US policy toward Israel

and Middle East policy generally.

But, so all of that, uh, is, is predictable enough, the

militarism, the trillion dollar defense budget, all predict, uh,

that was also predicted, right?

So like all of this is as expected, the global tariffs, you know, like

that's also, that was foreshadowed, I mean very, very plainly.

Um, so.

N none of this stuff has really surprised me except that it's super freaking fast.

Um, and that's that the one thing I had kind of like hoped was that in

US institutions and the courts and the so-called opposition party would

somehow act as speed bumps against this like counter-revolutionary project.

That's, that's which is kind of what it is.

Like, and counter-revolutionary, I should say, in like, uh, the Arnold Meyer Sense.

There's a scholar back in the day, he used Counter-Revolution as this

phrase to describe revolution from the right, like reactionary revolution.

So not, not countering a left-wing revolution, but kind of.

Building a like right wing world making project, laying it out.

Mm-hmm.

And then doing it and what that amounts to is kind of like a, a, a mashup of, of

white nationalism and oligarchy, which is to me very succinct description of,

of what we're dealing with, like who's in control of the state currently.

Um, lost track of the question at this point, but it's not surprise.

No,

I, but I, no, but I'll, I'll, I'll take you

back 'cause that's perfect.

'cause there's, there's two parts I already wanna unpack with you and

I'm debating which one to go first, but let's go with this one first.

Um.

Because I think the Iran Israel War is actually very instructive to just how

much he changed, because Kamala Harris went on 60 Minutes and said that Iran

was the biggest foreign policy threat to the United States on the campaign.

I remember wanting to self emulate when I heard that interview.

It's pretty insane.

Was what is, what is the difference between these two?

Like, I don't, I don't actually get it.

So do you think Kamala would've been different, or do you think that the

United States would've been bombing Iran?

Either way, like maybe Israel wouldn't have read Trump the

way that they did with Kamala?

'cause it seemed like Netanyahu knew exactly what buttons

to push with, with Trump.

But I don't know.

Do you think it would've been different if it were Kamala?

Um, I don't, I would like to say yes, but I don't, I don't think so.

What I don't think would've happened is an actual, like US bombing campaign,

US support for Israeli strikes, I'm pretty sure would've happened.

I, like, I, I'm actually confident that would've happened.

You see that getting signaled in statements from Kamala, like these

absurdist statements about like, Iran is the greatest threat to America.

Like what?

Um, it's just like, it, it's, it evokes like 2002 brain, you know?

Um, so like, yeah, that has to find expression somewhere if that's

what you believe and that's what you're trying to sell the public.

And so, um, I I, I, I'm sure it would find expression in sort of

mindless support for whatever Israel wants to do in the Middle East.

And, um, actually wrote a thing recently, like on the left, there's a view that,

um, or not in the European left, there's a view, Jean-Luc Malon, the leader of

the French left, like popular front.

Basically he, he did an interview in the new left review and he was,

it was kind of all over the place.

But one of the things that he made a point to say was that like the US is all.

Oil in the Middle East and it's oil driven policy.

And that's why they support, you know, Israeli assaults on Gaza

and Israeli attacks on Iran.

And like, I think that's actually not true.

So like oil is not a non-factor.

Like it's always part of, you know, geopolitical rationalizations.

Like it's always there, but it's like, just in my experience inside the system,

there was never a point ever where we sat around the table trying to figure

out what to do and talking about we need to secure the oil, or we gotta get to,

like, it's just never in the conversation.

It's always mm-hmm.

It's always in the background.

So it's not, I don't wanna say it's irrelevant, but like, it's never

as important as people suppose and materialist analysis, which

is what like a European leftist would, would have they focus on.

'cause it's like who benefits, right?

Follow the money.

Oil becomes the natural explanation for like, why we do

what we do in the Middle East.

But I think actually we do what we do in the Middle East, as horrific as it

is because of this misplaced belief that Israeli primacy is an American

good, like it serves American interests.

And so Israeli primacy requires bombing nuclear facilities of

its neighboring rivals, right?

It requires this mowing of the lawn, which is like a horrific way of

describing its war on Palestinians.

Um, and this is, so, like that's what we've signed onto and there's, there's

like actual formal expression of this in the forum of like the Pentagon.

There's an official policy called QME, right?

Qualitative military edge.

We, we, yes, we sell weapons to the Saudis and everyone in the Middle East,

but as a matter of policy, we make sure that we outsell them to Israel.

That that, that Israel, no matter how much we cause arms racing in the

Middle East or whatever, we make sure Israel is out arming everyone else.

And so, like, that's crucial that like, if you don't grasp that,

it's very hard to grasp, like, why, what's the deal with Iran?

Like, why would, why do we care at all?

You know?

Um, but it's tied up with this belief in Israeli primacy.

And like, I think it's a mistake in the sense that like, we're not

well served by Israeli primacy.

We're not well served by endless wars in the Middle East.

I mean, I think it's just a drain on American power basically.

Um, like I, I disagree a lot with like some of the maga foreign policy types.

One like narrow era where we agree is that.

The Middle East just, is it, it's a big siphon on American power.

Well, yeah, and it's strange, like at the, when

Trump was considering military action, you could almost see

the MAGA base start to fracture.

'cause Uhhuh, you know, Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon and all these voices on

Twitter like they were getting, you could tell that maybe the algorithm was juicing,

like anti bombing Iran things because like these, no nothing accounts we're

getting millions of views for railing on Trump for even considering this.

And yet.

Nothing.

Like I, I keep on going back to that.

Maybe Trump had the analysis right, better than everybody else, that

he really could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and it wouldn't matter.

Like, it doesn't matter that he bombed Iran.

It doesn't matter that he so clearly is like obfuscating,

the Jeffrey Epstein stuff.

Like, it just kind of moves on because I had, I had people in my life who voted

for Trump who were telling me, yo, this Iran thing, this is gonna be the end.

Like the base is going to turn on him because we did not want this.

This is a betrayal of exactly what he said.

And he went in and bombed them.

And then he was like, okay, it's over.

Like let's go back to business.

And none of those people are saying those things.

They're all back to, to what they were exactly saying before.

Um, and to your point about oil too, and this was another question I wanted to get

at you, since we're on the Middle East.

What you really cared about was oil.

You would probably take out the Houthis and something I cannot understand for

the life of me is that the Houthis are, they sunk two ships last week.

Mm-hmm.

Like they're gonna like enable Israel and help Israel bomb Iran back a couple

of years to set back a nuclear program.

But they're okay with the Houthis, just sinking vessels in the Persian Gulf.

And I had one analyst who came on and said, oh, it's because they're

like the sand people in Star Wars.

Like they have such a low quality of life.

Like, doesn't matter, they're in the desert.

There's nothing you can do.

But like that feels fundamentally unsatisfying to me.

Like what?

How are the Houthis still firing?

So anyway, take, well it's, that's sort of a two part, to

your point, it's at odds with a sort of oil centric explanation

of Middle East policy, right?

Like yeah, it pre presents a puzzle at a minimum.

But the Houthis thing is like.

It is effectively unwinnable.

And I think you even saw that in the whole signal gate thing when they,

when they were all, you know, secretly planning hhy bombing campaigns on signal.

Like there was a section of the JD Vance types who, it's not that they were like

anti interventionists so much as like, and this, again, this is an area where

I converged with them weirdly, there, there's an unfavorable cost exchange

ratio with the Houthis, where like they spend $6,000 to take out something, like,

to take out a missile on our side or to take out a, a, you know, have like a F

18 fall off a runway or something, and then we spend a million dollars on a

missile to take out their $6,000 drone.

You know, and so like if you keep, if a conflict involves the repeated play

or iterative exchange of, of attacks.

That's the cost of attack on each side respectively.

Then the cost exchange ratio makes this like it will bankrupt us to go

to war with the Houthis, you know, and I think there was like some of

that energy in the JD Vance stuff.

Yeah.

Um, well look at us like we're, we're, we're 13 minutes in and we,

we said the United States should not be bogged down in the Middle East.

And here we are bogged down in the Middle East in our conversation.

This is what, this is

what always happens.

Um, but let's rewind a little bit 'cause there was another thing

I wanted to double click on in what you said, because I know there are some Trump

supporters who were listening, and I'm sure that they want me to go back and ask

you to define terms like fascism, uhhuh, and white nationalism and oligarchy.

And I know lots of people throw those terms around and

have no idea what they mean.

I have read you well enough to know that you do know what they mean and

that you have put some thought behind it, and that you're not just throwing

those words out there because of Trump Deranging syndrome or anything else.

So I'll start very simply and give you sort of a layup here.

When you say fascism, like what are you saying?

Like what are you communicating to the listener or what do you want the

listener to understand about your characterization of the US government?

So you, you, at the level of the executive branch, you should see.

The firewall between domestic and international law enforcement and

the security state, like basically the military and the police.

You start to see that firewall drop, right?

That, that you, the military starts deploying at home, right?

That's actually like a huge warning indicator, right?

You should see the development of some kind of secret police,

which is effectively what ICE is.

You know, you should see militias roaming the country who engage in vigilante

justice, which I think we would've seen more of if Trump hadn't won.

I think in some ways his victory was like a, a release pressure valve on

some of the more like violent, far right white nationalist movements.

The three percenters and the oath keepers and stuff like that, they're

still out there and there's a concern that like this super surge of ice

funding is actually gonna basically put.

I mean, the short form is like they're putting proud boys on the payroll,

you know, of the, of the security state, which, um, it's just this

gray area, which would be common in a fascist regime, you know what I mean?

Um, but also like the, you're doing all of this to create, uh, a white national

social order in effect, which is literally what's happening when you're trying to a

romanticize this sort of like mid-century, 1950s model of what life was like, you

know, which was segregated and patriarchal and suburban and all this stuff.

And you can't recreate that.

It's not possible.

Like that was a singular moment in time.

Also, it was like, uh, if you weren't white, that was probably

not a great time to be alive.

Um, but also like even just putting all that aside, the,

the white nationalists like the.

What do you think the, like mass immigration purge is?

You know, what is it, what is it supposed to mean when you talk

about, I see this all the time being ethnically American, right?

Like, that is a gesture toward, uh, creating a white national social order

when you're taking brown folks and you're literally relocating them, uh, sometimes

even when they're citizens, you know?

Um, and there's so, like, this is, this is like, uh, zooming out a way

of understanding what's happening.

But it, and so people like Tooker Carlson and Steve Bannon, they,

it's almost like they wanna create a, her invoke social democracy.

So her invoke is a term that comes from apartheid South Africa.

As we know, the Apartheid South Africa project collapsed in on itself

because of enormous contradictions of the project they were trying to do.

It's actually like.

Hard to, impossible to, to create a white nationalist social democracy.

Right.

I, but I think that's especially within a, a multicultural country.

But I think that's what the, the Steve Bannon types actually do want.

And the, the difficulty and the, the, the hard limit that they face is that

they are in coalition with oligarchs, actual billionaires who actually

shape public policy in the law to their benefit, including the tax code.

The big beautiful bill is precisely the, I mean, it's just the tax, I

don't, I don't need to go on about this, the tax breaks and everything.

Um, so like, it's like the, the American state exists to the benefit

of the richest 1% of the country, and there's nothing populist in that.

And so, and the tech, the, the, the big tech class, the Silicon Valley

class of people who support Trump.

That's the sort of, that's, that's, that's a faction of capital that has aligned

itself with these, this her invoked social democracy faction that combines this,

this MAGA is like a new kind of fusion.

So during the Cold War, the conservative movement was this fusion movement, right?

Of like Christian evangelicals and neoliberals and like free traitors and

that kind of thing, and anti-communist.

And, um, they all sort of, uh, figured out they had different

priorities, but they all figured out a way to have like a common project.

And that was the, that was the Cold War conservative movement.

There was a period where the conservative movement was in the woods.

You know, like what are we after the demise of the Soviet Union.

Um, and so you have neocons and paleo cons kind of going in different direction.

MAGA represents this new fusion of.

You know, the tech elite of capital, the na parts of the national

security state and defense industrial complex, but then also this, this

like white nationalism in effect.

I mean, people call it different things, but it's like, it's the thing that Steve

Bannon is speaking to when he puts his voice out into the universe and Tucker

Carlson and they command millions of followers, including my fucking parents.

You know what I mean?

So,

so that's, and so that's the coalition.

Um, and so the, the who's, and you see so much of the tension that plays out in

Trump's public policy, his statements, all of this stuff in foreign policy,

even it's, it, it's often reducible to this conflict between what I would call

like the white nationalist section who's trying to do her invoke social democracy.

It they actually have a hegemonic project.

Right.

And the versus the oligarchs who are just trying to secure the bag, in

fact, and the, the most efficient way to do that is to divide the very large

working class along racial lines.

Yeah.

It's, it's the oldest trick in the book.

Like, instead of thinking about class-based issues, which poor white

people and poor black people and poor brown people all have the same interests.

Mm-hmm.

And things are going to get worse for them as a result of the one big, but,

but let's, let's make it about race, or let's make it about immigration.

And I, I will say like, there were two, two charts that I pulled

from Gallup this morning that.

Maybe gave me a little bit of of pause here because I dunno if you saw this one.

There was one where they asked Republicans their preferred rate of

immigration into the United States.

And at the end of 24, early 25, that number skyrockets up to 90%.

So 90% of Republicans are saying we should have less immigration

into the United States.

That number over just the last two months has declined to 48%.

So it's basically gone up and we're round tripping back to

where it was sort of normally.

And then I also pulled from Gallup, um, political voter identification.

So what parties people identify with.

And for a long time, independent sort of stayed where it was around 15, 20,

maybe into your mid 20 percents, and then the Democrats and Republicans

would kind of go back and forth.

For the last two years, Democrats and Republicans have been stuck at the same

number, and independents are much bigger.

As a faction, it's like 43% or something like that.

And then the Republicans and Democrats, the fringes of the party are literally

splitting things up halfway, which tells me that people don't like this.

In general, people don't like the direction that things are going and

say whatever you want about Trump.

Like, I don't think I've said this before on the podcast.

Like I don't have a sense that he thinks strategically or long term.

I think he's just an instinctual being.

Yeah.

And when he sees something that works politically, he does it.

And when it doesn't work, he just shifts to the next thing, which

is like both terrible and also sort of good at the same time.

'cause I don't think he believes in the things that you're just talking about.

I think he's just this like instinctual thing that pushes on buttons.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he decides that they work.

No, but it, it looks to me like the electorate is not

gonna go along with this.

It's, I, it looks to me like most people disagree with this.

So where am I?

Why should I not be sanguine based on that data?

Well,

so yeah.

So I think you're, I think you're right about the rising unpopularity of this

stuff, but like, it's like, well, who knew a episiotomies would be unpopular?

You know what I mean?

Like, of course.

So sorry.

No, you're good.

Um, that's why you're here.

So like, I think that's true enough.

I think the problem, the thing that's profoundly concerning to me right now

is that we seem to be in this moment, and I don't know if it's because

we all have fish brain and nobody reads anymore or what, but there we,

there's no, almost like, there's no accountability.

Like we're in a PA in the past.

Okay, this is a good example.

In the past, like the Iraq war, terrible decision, you know, every,

like everybody knew, half the country knew at the moment that it was a

terrible decision, more than half even.

But the Bush administration invested like a solid 18 months.

Running ba like a nationwide propaganda campaign, you know, mushroom cloud

rhetoric and hysteria, and going on all the Sunday shows and lining things up

with the allies and like, it was a hard, hard, whole of government push to sell the

Iraq war before doing the Iraq war Iraq.

Mm-hmm.

In the chomps, the Chomsky would call that manufacturing consent.

Right.

You have to, as you have to like massage the public's imagination

into doing this thing, make it common sense, make it within the boundaries

of what would be acceptable or normal.

We seem to be in a post manufacturing consent age where like mm-hmm.

The, the, the pol the political class to some extent.

Even in the Biden administration, the political class seems to like

not feel the need to manufacture consent so much anymore.

And I think the speed run thing that we were talking about

at the beginning of the show.

That's, that's kind of, uh, an, uh, an manifestation of that, like

your speed running as a way of avoiding manufacturing consent.

It's like an alternative to manufacturing consent.

Mm-hmm.

And so in, if, if you actually don't need, or if you feel as a political elite that

you don't need the consent of the people to do what you do, and you just have the

best interests of the people you know, in heart or whatever, then it doesn't

matter if what you're doing is unpopular.

You know, like us position on Israel is wildly unpopular during the Biden

administration, and they just doubled down and tripled down, you know, so

like, I I, and so this is not unique to Trump, but I think it's, it's

heightened under Trump, which is that like, who cares what the people think.

They're gonna do what they're gonna do.

And so I think Trump is this kind of finger in the wind guy who will

just go in whatever direction.

Um, he feels pressured to go, but the public is not the main source of wind

that he's checking with his finger.

Right.

It's, it's one among many sources of pressure on him, others of

which are his oligarch buddies, you know, or his base separate

from the American people at large.

And so the, the Jeffrey Epstein stuff is super weird.

I, I don't have a lot to say about it, but it's super weird in the sense that I think

to a normal person, the Jeffrey Epstein stuff is like this niche conspiracy stuff.

And, uh, to the mega base, it's almost like a founding mythology.

Like it's very important.

It's a signal of what you believe about so many other things, right?

It's, it's like a syne.

And so, um.

The fact that like, so for normal people, I, they were not anticipating

that like there would be a maga base blowup over, uh, Jeffrey Epstein files

not being released and that Trump's FBI would be the one like sort of

holding things back or, or denying it.

But like that actually more so than anything else, and this is the moment

that we're living in, that's so perverse that kind of creates a legitimacy

crisis for Trump that's quite acute.

Like this is very serious for Trump because this is the only base of

legitimacy that he has separate from laws, separate from, you

know, correlations of forces with the Congress and all this stuff.

It's like he has a MAGA base that allowed him to give the middle finger

to every other source of power because he could claim that he was like their

stand-in and if they are burning their MAGA hats, which I'm seeing online

everywhere, you know what I mean?

He has a very serious problem, you know.

And this Pam Bondi, you know, cash Patel fissure or whatever.

I don't think it matters in itself, but you can like see how he's

processing and gonna react to this based on how he deals with that.

My, my real concern to get to the foreign policy stuff, I guess, is that

like, these are the conditions within which diversionary conflicts happen.

Diversionary war, you know?

Mm-hmm.

Political scientists, like in general, who I, I don't think are incredibly

brilliant people by any stretch, but their conve, their conventional

wisdom is that diversionary war is like rare slash not a thing.

Like tail wag the dog.

You go to war to direct divert attention from domestic politics.

I think that is a thing.

I mean, I think it's more of a thing than political scientists think.

Um, and I would be worried about what a legitimacy crisis in Trump's

mind compels him to do elsewhere.

The willingness to put on, to create spectacle elsewhere,

what that will look like.

That's a concern for me.

Yeah.

We've already seen some of that, I have to say with the, with the Epstein stuff.

I mean the, the, the imperfect metaphor I've been thinking of, they

were burning LeBron's jersey when he left Cleveland the first time.

And when he wanted to come back and got them the championship, they were

like, cool, welcome back LeBron.

And you got us a championship.

Everything's fine.

Yeah.

Like I really, I think Trump has the measure of his base.

I don't think they'll even turn on him for this, but maybe this

will be the time that it does it.

But I take your point, and you can maybe read Iran as part of that.

Like he has done a 180 on Russia, Ukraine here.

Mm-hmm.

In the last week in putting he in his place.

Um, you may want to talk about.

There's, you know, there's ever a conspiracy theory out there

that the United States is gonna go to war with, with China in

the South China Sea and bridge.

Kolby is there.

And he has said before that maybe he's gonna manufacture

something that's in there.

Yeah.

Um, so I mean, are we already seeing the seeds of the dive?

And that's before we even get into Korea in your wheelhouse, which I wanna spend a

little, we can do it now too, but I wanna spend at least some time with you on it.

'cause I've been thinking about it a lot too.

So do you think we're already seeing the seeds of that?

Is that how we should read Russia, Ukraine, and even Iran and even some of

the stuff that's happening with China?

Yeah, it, it's funny, I used to, there was a time when I actually

worked with Bridge Kolby, like we were in the same think tank milieu before

I, uh, grew a conscience and basically like, so he, he didn't change, I changed.

Um, but the bridge is like single-minded about World War III with China

and needing to be able to win it.

And half of him set.

Like I've, I track him closely because I knew him and because I, I knew that

he was the only like foreign policy Mandarin for a long time who openly

associated himself with the MAGA project, which is like sto beyond the

pale within establishment Washington.

And I knew that that meant that he was gonna become, you know, he was like

a DTE bench player in foreign policy.

Like, I mean, I'm not trying to disin like he was like a, a nobody basically.

And the fact that he was hitching his wagon to this, this project that was

defining half of the political spectrum in America, I knew that was going to

basically like shoot him up like a meteor, um, in terms of his career.

And that's precisely what happened.

Um.

So for those reasons, I paid close attention to him for,

for in the intervening years.

For a long time he has been obsessed with war with China, and part of him is, his

belief is that by optimizing for war with China, by focusing every ounce of our

like national energy and our resources toward that, that project being able to

win that war, we might deter that war.

And if we don't deter that war, well at least we'll win it.

And so that's the, and that the, the problem with that is that

that's not a war that's like worth winning and it's not winnable short

of going to nuclear exchanges.

Like you, you would have to come up with an argument or a scenario for how nuclear

weapons don't get used, but somehow you can still defeat this techno superpower.

90 kilometers from its own shores, thousands of miles from our shores.

You know what I mean?

Like the imbalance.

Mm-hmm.

The, the imbalance of geography plus the technology makes

it effectively unwinnable.

And the only reason we kind of hang on to the need to be able to win it is because,

well, the military industrial complex has defined it as the, like the scenario that

we use to develop our force structure.

So the trillion dollar national security state plus it, it is indexed

against great power worth China.

That's what justifies most of it.

Right?

You don't need like nuclear powered submarines and six generation

fighters to go after Houthis or to target Mexican cartels.

You know what I mean?

Like he, the, that stuff is for China.

It's basically for China alone.

You don't need it for anybody else.

And that's a huge, that's a follow of the money thing.

Like that's a materialist analysis that actually has traction.

I think it has explanatory power.

Yeah.

Um, so there's, there's like that part of it, but Bridge doesn't like it.

I don't think he wants to create the war.

He thinks the war is inevitable.

Like he's one of these guys that thinks it's, it's gonna happen

and since it's gonna happen, we have to optimize for winning it.

Nevermind that.

There's just no scenario.

I've been in like a hundred of these war games on Taiwan scenarios.

Not none of it's winnable.

You know, in the south you mentioned the South China Sea,

sort of like casually or whatever.

Mm-hmm.

That actually, like I could imagine scenarios where that is winnable.

I can't imagine scenarios where China bothers to fight it.

Like, I don't, like, I just, you know, like Taiwan is something where

for them the stakes are, are worth fighting for, fighting a great power

war for possibly, I was trying to see, it's like, you know, they, they

basically have their way there already.

They don't need to press their luck too much.

Um, it's, i, it, it is far, much farther away from their own shores.

So they have like logistical issues and it stretches them thin and it's

like, I don't think they're super interested in fighting a war there.

You know, I think they're may be interested in like asserting

influence in the whatever that means, you know, in the vague sense.

But in the PLA is a little bit rogue sometimes, but Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean we had Dale Copeland on the podcast maybe 12 months ago and he like did

work with Bridge Kolby when he was still getting his PhD or something like that.

So he, yeah, they had

a falling out I think, but they were friendly at one point.

I.

They were, but we have an open invitation to bridge Colby.

So if you're listening and you are more than welcome to come on the

show at any time and talk about this stuff, I will put you through

your paces on the other direction.

But to, to me, like what you're, what you're saying, like, and I'll ask you

this question, but like, I don't, not only do I not think war's inevitable,

I don't think the Chinese want it.

I think it's a fundamental misreading of what China's thinking here.

Yeah, totally.

They, they, they also just watched what Russia did with Ukraine.

Like their blueprint is Hong Kong.

They're just gonna do the exact same thing they did with Hong Kong and they would

like to take it without firing a shot.

So if you really want to prep for this.

Well, and, and, and there's another, um, contradiction here

too, which we can talk about.

And this goes to the point of like, how is Trump thinking strategically?

Because okay, you've got bridge kby and the trillion dollars and the six

generation fighters, and we gotta prepare for great power war with

China, and yet we're gonna go to the Japanese and the South Koreans and

basically say, go fuck yourselves.

Here are some tariffs.

Uh, and by the way, are you gonna come defend Taiwan when

China invades you better?

'cause otherwise there's even more tariffs in the bag for you.

Like, don't, like do it.

Like how, how are you like supposed to be thinking about great China war

power, all this other stuff, and yet fundamentally shitting on the allies who

would be so critical to actually having any sort of efficacy in the war too.

Like right hand and left hand don't seem to know what they're

doing or don't seem to care that they're at complete cross purposes.

No, totally ridiculous.

Um, I do think that I, I was talking about this with somebody yesterday actually.

I think what's what's happening right now?

'cause like Bridge is doing a, on behalf of the Pentagon, he is

doing this review of Aus, right?

Mm-hmm.

And then at the same time, he is the main source of this pressure on the allies

to like pre-commit to a Taiwan thing.

I think I, I don't know that he expects to actually get ally commitments

upfront, but he, this is a little bit, um, this is speculation on my part.

I, I think what he's trying to do is kill Aus because he thinks that we don't

need to be arming an ally at the expense of our military capacity, which is kind

of what Aus represented, like the sub.

If we, if we deliver nuclear submarines to Australia, it would

come at the expense of our ability to produce submarines for ourselves.

Okay.

And he wants to amass American power directly, not in conjunction

with our, you know, sub imperialist powers and client states.

And so I, because he, but like Aus is politically controversial.

It's contested, right?

Um, and there's a bunch of inertia in favor of Aus within Washington.

So he wants to kill this thing that he hates for reasons, military,

industrial base, whatever.

Um, but that's like not the easiest thing to do.

One way to make it easier is to alienate Australia just full

stop, like entirely, you know?

And so putting this, uh, pre-commitment pressure on an ally that, you know,

they're not gonna sign up for like.

Everything is depends on context.

The idea that you're gonna like pre-commit without knowing the context.

In a situation where America's already running this like highly

revisionist foreign policy that's like very aggressive on every front.

Like of course you're not gonna sign up for that, but in not signing up for it,

you're creating more, um, friction, right?

And if, if the, if the relationship is, is rupturing in a, in a way,

then it becomes natural to jettison August to shut it down, to kill it,

to come out with a review of policy that says this is not in the American

national interest or whatever.

And so, mm-hmm.

I, that is kind of what I think is happening.

And then like tariffs create with, with all the allies.

I mean, especially with like Japan, it creates trade space where it's like

the Trump administration is trying to.

Maximize, whatever leverage it can get for like extracting from its allies and

allies weirdly get more coercive pressure than like non allies it seems like.

But um, that, I don't think that there's like some grand game in that necessarily,

but like the pre-commitment stuff plus tariffs, plus the Aus review, all of it

is basically saying like, if you zoom out, we're looking for block politics.

This is an imperialist foreign policy.

Are you part of an American sphere of influence or not?

The answer can be no.

In which case see ya, you know, because Trump is not

interested in alliances really.

Anyways.

Steve Bannon, Steve Bannon is not interested in alliances.

He said this in 2017, there are no allies.

There are only protectorates.

Right?

Which is again, that's imperialist foreign policy.

That's sphere of influence brain.

You know, so if the, if the sort of like MAGA foreign policy orientation

is toward spheres of influence and protectorates, but not alliances

well, how do you sort of like further that along or socialize that further?

And it's like you have to keep putting choices on the allies one after another

that makes them break away, which they're very reluctant to do, but they're

starting to do because of, I mean, it, you're, you're putting impossible

choices on them or they're just going to eat your shit and appease you and

fall in line, in which case, yes, they are a protectorate at that point.

You know what I mean?

Uh, yeah.

And so like the allies that have not come to terms with that reality yet,

but I think that's the hard choice that's being repeatedly put on them.

Yeah, well that, that leads to a great question, which I'm really

struggling with, particularly in, in, in the Japanese and South Korean context.

Also to a certain degree in the German context.

Like, 'cause to your point, it's tariffs.

They don't even know what the United States is asking from them.

That seems to change, like literally within meetings.

So like they're completely perplexed, but the question is like, is it actually gonna

change anything like it, what does Japan breaking with the United States look like?

Like I know that Prime Minister Ishiba is using some pretty strong language,

but he's not exactly strongly supported and Japan has serious interests

like it, there's a reason that it's so aligned with the United States.

It's been aligned with the United States since 45.

Yeah, they're the same with South Korea.

So like, are they just gonna have to eat it?

Like, are they just gonna have to be the protector?

It's what does it look like if they break away?

And is that even possible for them in your point of view?

Well, so I don't think, uh, there's a lot of, uh,

stickiness here, path dependence.

Right.

And that, that, that weighs, I think, very heavily in many ways on our client

states, on our allies, especially Japan.

Especially Japan, right?

Like Japan has, has failed to imagine the situation that it finds itself in.

And I find that absolutely derelict on their part.

Like, you didn't see this fucking coming for the last 10 years.

Are you serious?

Like, do you understand American politics at all?

And I think no slight to, you know, the Japan hands in my life, but like

I think America's Japan hands in the foreign policy class, they have existed

primarily to perpetuate an illusion in Japan, in the elite circles in Japan

about American politics and about what America is about, and about the

realities of like, you know, America.

American decision making America the way it sees the world and priorities

and, and even American power.

And so like the, the expert class who like, sort of manages foreign

policy relations with, with these countries, Japan, Australia, South

Korea, they mostly have facilitated this illusion that made Trump impossible to

foresee, that made Maga and its rise and its prominence and its takeover

of politics, impossible to foresee.

And the, the consequence of that is that they had gone all in basically on American

hegemony, not realizing that we're in hegemonic decline for a long time.

I mean, this is not new.

Like Trump is just an acceleration of it, in my view.

And so they've never really thought of a plan B, you know, and it Aus

itself was a, was like a tripling down.

Like there's a, a great article by Jonathan Caley, he's a professor at the

Naval War College, and he was talking about how like Aus in integrates America

in, or uh, Australia into American, um, grand strategy at the level of like the

industrial base and operational plans.

And so like it's, it is like basically forsaking Australian sovereignty

in a way, in hopes of grafting Australia onto America that hard.

Right?

It's like that, that's what I mean by like tripling down on, on America,

like tripling down on this sort of unipolar vision of the world and mm-hmm.

That is of course, stupendously problematic if you care about Australian

democracy and sovereignty and not being dragged into World War III or

being asked to do weird shit like.

You know, El Salvador in prisons, which I think is probably

gonna be coming at some point.

You know, like we have a bunch of people we're deporting, can you take them?

Um, that's like what we're using our, our political capital for now.

Um, but I forget what I was saying, actually, I just lost my own point, but,

oh, so Japan in particular, they, uh, don't have a plan B, but I think what

it looks like to break from the US is to diversify economic relations,

political relations, and maybe even security relations with China and with

the Bris nations and to ratchet down the hysteria about great power competition.

So mm-hmm.

What we saw that what we're coming out of a period right now, the

past eight years or so, where the EU and Australia and Japan.

A little bit.

The Philippines, they were going bananas, inflating the China threat, in part

because the elites in these countries because it was a way of like, uh,

rallying the US to your side in a way.

Yep.

And so like, it was kind of sidestepping the reality of, of the whole MAGA project.

But in doing this threat inflation about China, they were antagonizing China.

And what they're finding now is that like rallying to America's side in

a geopolitical sense is very high risk and the upside is completely

abstract and not evident really.

Like what do you get out of that?

Unclear, what do you pay for that a lot?

And what, what's the, what's, what's the exposure risk?

World War iii?

I mean, like, it couldn't be greater, you know what I mean?

So as a value proposition, America looks really shitty.

All of a sudden, although if you had your, you know, if you were

right sizing it, it probably looked shitty for a few years now.

Um, and so seeing that America's not is a, is basically a liability

strategically at this point.

What do you do?

Well, you don't wanna antagonize America.

That would not be prudent.

You know, it's any more than you would want to antagonize China, but you do have

to start right sizing the China threat.

You do have to, like perversely, I think we're see, and we're seeing this

with Australia too, they're investing a lot more in showing restraint toward

China, trying to coexist with China.

And they're, um, they're, they're focusing more on trade, win-win,

blah, blah, you know, all that stuff.

Which is like normal shit, you know?

But there was just a period where we were all drunk on great power competition and

that it, it had to do with these like pathologies of like being attracted to

America as Uncle Sugar, who was gonna be our security source and all of that.

We couldn't imagine a different world.

Well now they're trying, starting to imagine a different world.

It's a little bit too late, but I think what that ends up looking

like is more aligning with China and the Bricks plus nations.

Yeah, well, I mean, some are still drunk on

the Great Power competition.

I dunno if you saw Emmanuel Macron's speech over the weekend

where he talked about another 10 billion euros for French defense.

Yeah.

And, uh, I, I actually wrote down the line that seared into my brain, uh,

I, my French is not passable, but he said in English, uh, to be free in

this new world, you must be feared.

To be feared.

You have to be powerful.

The whole nation must be stronger.

If I hadn't told you that was Macron, we could have guessed, is it Machiavelli?

Is it, uh, somebody else?

Like, who knows?

So that's the thing that is out there too.

I wonder though, like we sort of saw a version of this with

the first Trump administration.

'cause to your point, some of this was telegraphed and then Trump

went away and it was a fever dream.

And it seems to me that the Macca coalition can't survive without him.

So unless he's gonna somehow enlist a third term, or his son or

somebody else is gonna get in there.

It seems to me that this house of cards falls apart for another three years.

So I'm not saying this is the only scenario that a country like Japan

could index on, but I have to imagine there's at least one analyst that

is saying, you know what, keep your head down and get to the end of this.

And in three years they won't be able to marshal this kind of incoherence and

all the things that are coming, like the cuts on Medicaid and the problems in the

economy that they're gonna create, and the inflation that's gonna be driven.

Like just sit tight, like the United States will come back around

to you and we'll feel guilty.

It'll probably make it up to you.

Do, is is there any credibility to that at all?

Or we'll blow it up.

So

I think there's no credibility to that.

However, I do think I know in fact that most Japan hands there,

these are the barbarian handlers.

They're telling the Japanese that they're telling the Japanese that

be, I, I think they have a poor understanding of America, frankly.

But like they're, they're telling the Japanese like, just sit tight.

Just keep a low profile.

Just buy time.

Do whatever you have to do to buy time because the pendulum will swing back.

Right, and I don't think that's true at all.

Like the, what the, the Biden administration itself was the illusion

of the pendulum swinging back.

It was like a desperate desire on everybody's part to feel the

restoration of normalcy, even though we knew it wasn't true.

And that's why we're living through this shit that we're living through right now.

2025 would not be such a shit show if it wasn't for the, it, like the, the pendulum

is in a totally different, I mean, the pendulum metaphor doesn't even work.

Like we're in a totally, it's, it's the river and the man, right?

A man steps into the river and then he steps into it a second time.

It's not the same river and it's not the same man.

Right?

It's, it's always changing.

And that's what's going on.

Like this Trump 2.0 is not Trump 1.0 for a second time.

It's a totally different beast.

And the Biden administration was not the Obama administration,

it was a nostalgia project to pretend like we could go to brunch.

And it was the unipolar moment again, and all was, well, we just gotta

keep this fascist out of office.

Right.

That was the sort of thinking that they had and that wasn't real.

And so they handed Trump all of this imperial power because they didn't

take seriously their own diagnose.

They didn't have a diagnosis of Trump.

They just, they, they used fascism as like name calling, right?

As opposed to, to a diagnosis.

And so in name calling him that, they were like, look, we can just close

ranks, make everyone vote for us like in 2020, and then all will be

well and we can keep going to brunch and then we can keep having meetings

with diplomats in other countries.

And so that's it.

So those people are the ones who are meeting with the Japanese government

and telling them, keep your head down.

This is Trump 1.0.

What worked in Trump 1.0, buy time.

That's different.

I do think what you're saying is that, that the thing that's right there is like,

Trump is the uniquely charismatic figure.

There's no obvious successor.

I don't think somebody like JD Vance can pull this off,

but there is no opposition.

There's no, like, the Democratic party has lost all legitimacy.

Like they suck.

You know, like, and they, they're denying any, anybody who steps up and tries to

act as a populist, anybody who's trying to respond to the needs of working people

in America, anybody who's against war, which is a low bar, like they don't want

their politicians taking those stances.

They don't want anybody who's gonna be cri critical of usis Israel policy.

You know, they, if, if you say abolish ice, they don't want you to be, uh,

a democratic member of Congress.

In effect, this is the leadership of the party and it's like, this is not an

op, this is not a meaningful opposition.

And so it's like not clear to me the reason people voted for Trump

wasn't because they loved him.

They looked at the Democrats and they're like, you guys

are just a bunch of Jeffrey.

You might as well be a bunch of Jeffrey Epstein's.

You know what I mean?

Like you're, and a lot of them are.

Yeah.

And I'd like to see that list too.

You know what I mean?

That's the view.

It's like the Democrats were written off a long time ago in the Biden administration,

once it became clear that like the IRA and Chips and Science Act, these like banner

initiatives of omics, they were utterly disconnected from the lived reality.

Of people in America who were increasingly precarious.

This is the source material that MAGA taps into.

If you can't recapture that yourself or address those conditions

yourself, we're all fucked.

It's all fucked.

It doesn't matter if there's no, I mean, JD Vance became senator as a, he was

AstroTurf his way to being a senator, not because he was charismatic, and you know,

it was totally because billionaire Peter Thiel bought him the seat, basically,

you know, so like I can imagine him becoming president or somebody like

him on AstroTurf grounds because in an oligarchy, again, the diagnosis matters.

In an oligarchy, you can buy the presidency.

You know, the Supreme Court has made that possible now.

So you don't have to be a charismatic leader.

You just have to have a movement that started with a charismatic leader.

Then everyone starts becoming more cynical.

Hegemonic decline, imperial decline accelerates.

And what does this look like?

I don't know.

California secession.

I mean, you know, like horrific scenarios start, start spinning

in my mind at a certain point.

Um, or I'm wrong.

And the pendulum could just swing back and we'll get President Buttigieg

and everybody will go back to brunch and pretend like it's normal until

the, the militias start bombing Starbucks or something, you know?

Well, there's a rosy scenario.

I mean, you, you, you made the point about the conservatives being out in the woods.

Uh, you know, the left is obviously out in the woods too.

Yeah.

And the left doesn't stand for anything at this point, or to the extent it stands.

With anything.

It stands with very, very localized hyper-focused concerns.

And not with the working class and not what it, and, and like has lost

like in some sense it's, it's, you know, I can't blame some of them

because in some sense it's a loss of faith in the American project.

And I get that.

I get why, you know, people get disillusioned with things, but you know,

it's just that, that sense of American pragmatism and progressivism and that

you can use government to fix things.

Mm-hmm.

Like that is just, that's just dead.

And when you go to those Gallup polls and you see the 43% don't like, uh,

uh, identify with any party, those are the ones that are telling you like, we

don't like the MAGA guys and we don't like this meaningless cipher stick.

Jeffrey Epstein also stuff with the left, like, can somebody please talk

to us and nobody's talking to them.

Um, van, I could go on with you for three hours, but this is not the

Joe Rogan podcast and I would be remiss if I did not at least give

you a couple of minutes to cook on.

Korea because one, oh yeah, sorry.

One thing that is that, that was

like a, one of the major priorities.

No, no, no, no.

It's, I, I knew, I knew this was gonna happen and I, I don't wanna keep you

too long 'cause we've already, I've already kept you for 55 minutes and I'm

sure you have a busy day ahead of you.

But the reason I wanted to come to it at the very end was because I know you said

that, you know, different man, different river, but you know, the old trite uh,

history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes.

So we had the Iran thing, like if we're, if we're following, if we're following

the same blueprint like North Korea.

Should be right around the corner.

And if we're bombing Iran, 'cause they have nukes, well, North Korea

has more nukes and they're scary and they can actually hit us.

And that sort of has been swept under the rug.

And you've got a new South Korean leader who I'm extremely interested

in who seems to, anyway, so just, just give us like, are you worried

about that popping off next?

Are you not worried about that?

Popping off next, what do you think about South Korean, north

Korean relations in the context of this new South Korean government?

Like just, just cook on whatever you want for a couple minutes on this.

Yes, yes.

So I mean, so North Korea, now we're at a point where it has a pretty

reliable nuclear deterrent, which is the reason why we had all that

crisis, you know, on the brink stuff going on in 2017 and 2018, right?

That culminated in the summit diplomacy.

So now North Korea has that, so it doesn't have a need.

To antagonize the US at this point, except that it's under a pretty

like brutal sanctions regime still.

So North Korea has, um, like Kim, the Kim Jong regime has material interests

in getting those sanctions removed.

And it's always had a priority of, for the sake of its own security,

getting us troops out of South Korea.

The idea is not to wage a war.

They're not, I mean, war is just like not if, no matter what your regime is, war is

like not a good thing to be involved in.

You know, it's extremely costly and risky for your, your own safety and stuff.

So, like, north Korea's not interested in a war, but it won't be secure as

long as US troops are in South Korea.

And what's going on with, uh, EJ Meng, the current president, he's

kind of, I people say he is like South Korean, Bernie Sanders.

That's like a way overstatement.

Um, or like, not a perfect analogy, but it does capture something in

the sense that like he, he's trying to design public policy in South

Korea for the, the working class.

Um, and, and that's hasn't really happened in South Korea before, so.

Mm-hmm.

He's trying to take seriously using policy to respond to this sort of

economic malaise that we face the reality of precarity that most people face.

Um, it's a little weird to do that in a place like South Korea

because it's an export based economy and the export advantage

is effectively cheap labor still.

You know what I mean?

So, mm-hmm.

What does, what does that look like?

Well, maybe it looks like not so much redistribution of wages, but um,

redistribution of concentrations of capital into state projects of some kind.

Can serve, like, you know, investments in university or higher education,

healthcare may best betting on r and d.

There's a lot of that going on.

So like that, that is like the domestic part, the foreign policy part.

You know, he's representing the Democratic Party within South Korea.

EJ Mong the new president.

But, um, and that party has a tradition of conciliation toward North Korea.

They treat, it's all about diplomacy.

They're our wayward little brother.

They've, you know, they, they need to go to rehab, we're gonna

help them out kind of thing.

And like, so like we all know somebody like that.

So that's their, historically, their attitude, like a little paternalistic.

Right?

Um, it's not clear that Ejm is ready to go down that path.

He's looking to be more pragmatic.

He hasn't foreshadowed a lot of what he, he's not going to be

jingoistic toward North Korea.

And that's good.

No saber rattling.

That's good.

But he's not going to be, um, like this broadcasting peace diplomacy thing that,

um, the last Democratic party leader had Mu Jian, which was under Trump 1.0.

So the summit diplomacy that Trump and Kim had, a lot of that had to

do with Moon Jian, who was like pushing hard on peace diplomacy.

And that's not really, uh, maybe that could, that could come up at some point.

But like EJ Meg's priority is more like avoiding war overall and then managing and

improving strategic relations with China.

So like they, like we talked before about how Japan, Australia, they're in this

mode right now of like rights, right?

Sizing their threat perceptions.

Away from the threat inflation, away from the great power competition a bit,

um, interestingly, because you mentioned the Macron thing, Europe's Europe has

like so much distance from China and from China conflict stuff that it could

it do threat inflation on China and like their exposure to the consequences

to that is like far removed, you know?

And so like for Japan and Korea and even to some extent Australia,

they have to live with the shadow of China, like no matter what.

And so like, um, there's an incentive to kind of get along if you can't count

on America to get along with China.

That is.

And so for South Korea, that's very much the case and that's

where EJ Mung is right now.

Uh.

There will be probably some diplomacy with North Korea, but

it's not gonna be highly ambitious.

I don't think it will be much more pragmatic.

Um, the, the US is the interesting variable here because Trump doesn't

seem super interested in summit diplomacy, uh, with Kim Jong-un after

the previous rounds didn't go anywhere.

And Kim Jong-un feels burned by the fact that the summit diplomacy

didn't go anywhere in 20 18, 20 19.

So, um, we could end up in a situation where the US and Trump

is once again threatening fire and fury like that can actually happen.

But it would be in a context where Kim Jong-un already has the nuclear

deterrent he needs, in which case you're threatening fire and fury

against another nuclear state.

Like where, where's that gonna go?

To what end, you know what I mean?

So, uh, mutually assured destruction should hold, I would hope.

But like that's, that, that's, uh, an outlier possibility

that that could come back.

Um, and I think EJ Mong would be invested in a pro North Korea

projects to the extent that it prevents that or forecloses on that.

Yeah.

So stay out of a nuclear crisis.

That would be like the main thing.

Um, yeah, your advice.

But I mean, if, if he's casting about for diversionary conflict, I don't, on,

on the flip side, if you're Kim Jong-Un, like you're, I don't know, it seems like

things are going towards the United States withdrawing troops from South Korea.

Anyway.

Maybe I'm misreading things, but maybe just let Trump Oh, that was

the, that was the Trump keep doing it.

That was the variable part that I meant to mention, which is the,

there is a win win win bank shot here between North Korea, South Korea, and the

us and it involves pulling out troops.

When I say us, I mean like the current presidency or whatever, but basically,

Trump doesn't want troops there.

He's, he wants to basically extort the shit outta South Korea

in order to keep troops there.

America is becoming more unpopular every day in South Korea.

EJ Young's presidency is not hot on America at all.

Doesn't think America is necessary in the context of China.

Like for, for South Korean security, right?

Mm-hmm.

It's just been a, a historical thing.

Path dependence.

Um, there was a period where we were, us was needed to deter North Korea,

but we're past that now, right?

So there, there's a scenario where like American unpopularity makes

it politically easy to say, look.

We love you American troops, but we're not gonna pay out the ass.

We're not gonna get fucked just to keep you here.

So if it's gonna be we take it in the ass or you leave, thank you for your service.

Go, go fuck yourselves.

Go leave.

You know what I mean?

And so, and, and Trump would be just fine with that.

And at that point, of course, South Korea would also be just fine with that.

And like we said, North Korea has wished for that on a star for like 70 years.

So like that could be win, win-win and in an environment where, uh, there's no

US sort of umbrella over South Korea.

Interesting things start to happen on the peninsula.

I, I don't, I, that deserves more attention actually, like

what that would look like.

But the, the normal way that, um, people talk about unification in Korea.

There has always been this weird reactionary assumption that

South Korea absorbs North Korea.

Mm-hmm.

And if North Korea has nukes that ain't happening, it's

gonna look like something else.

And the, the thing I had always feared was that South Korea would become

this predatory, extractive regime on North Korean natural resources.

Mm-hmm.

So it's like mm-hmm.

Basically North Korea becomes a, a site of slave labor for a, like,

south Korean extractive project.

But as long as the regime in North Korea exists, it would be hard.

There will be some of that, some of that.

But, uh, North Korea would have to be getting a cut of it.

Of course.

And so, like, there could be some kind of like negotiated capitalist piece.

Weird as it is to say on the peninsula that is foreseeable in a world

where US troops kind of like vacate.

Um.

The question is, what if US troops vacate?

Does Japan go nuclear?

Does South Korea see a justification at the there?

So like there are second order questions that are not trivial

that would follow from that.

But in terms of just us, North Korea, South Korea, I think troop removal

is the bank shot that lets everybody take away something positive.

Yeah.

And I'm sure that Kim Jong-Un would hand deliver, uh, president Trump's

Nobel Peace Prize nomination for engineering such a thing on the peninsula.

He could just add to his stack of letters, uh, for people thanking

him for, for such wonderful things.

Yeah, man, I've already kept you longer than I should have.

Thank you so much.

Uh, and hopefully I'll talk to you soon.

Yeah, thank you.

This was fun.