The Un-Diplomatic Podcast

In Part II of Van's sit-down w/ Professor Daniel Immerwahr (author of How to Hide an Empire), they talk about Daniel's recent chapter about the politics and ideology of George Lucas's Star Wars. Was …

Why do geopoliticians blow off climate change and environmental degradation?  Is geography really an insurmountable force?  What do "geopolitical risk consultants" really do?  And what should we make…

What does war and violence abroad do to politics at home?  Why were early Cold War intellectuals obsessed with who "lost China?" And what did the realists of the 1940s and 1950s believe about not jus…

In this interview episode, Van sits down with Professor Jeanne Morefield to discuss critiques of liberalism and empire. Why does liberalism seem to always be obsessed with crisis and triumphalism, of…

In this interview episode, Van sits down with Professor Jeanne Morefield to discuss critiques of liberalism and empire. Why does liberalism seem to always be obsessed with crisis and triumphalism, of…

Van, Kate, and Hunter unpack the mass uprisings in China, situating them in the context of ongoing worker struggles. They probe weaponized anti-semitism. They discuss the origins of Sino-US rivalry a…

In this episode, Van chats with David Parsons, host of The Nostalgia Trap.  They talk about his upbringing in Ventura, California during the 1990s, why he's obsessed with '90s pop culture and film, t…

Where have all the peace intellectuals gone?  How do you make enemies into friends?  What's it like to be mixed-race in national security?  Should we do away with economic sanctions entirely?  Is it …

In this special one-off episode of the pod, Van Jackson joins a panel hosted at Australian National University's Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, alongside Greg Raymond, Ian Hall, and Yun J…

Lyle Jeremy Rubin joins the podcast to talk about his new memoir "Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine's Unbecoming." Lyle and Van discuss the way that hypocrisy radicalizes people, the troubl…

Central banks are using inflation to fight a class war. America's Pacific sphere of influence is making it paranoid--what ham-fisted skullduggery in the Marshall Islands reveals. Was George W. Bush m…

This episode is from an original release in January 2022. Dr. Van Jackson sits down with John Feffer, co-director of the Foreign Policy in Focus project at the Institute for Policy Studies.  They tal…

Why self-determination for Guam is better strategy than persisting as an American colony. Why oligarchic concentrations of wealth in the US and China need ethnonationalism...and why that's dangerous.…

In this deliciously radical episode, Dr. Van Jackson sits down with Malcolm Harris, author of Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials, and the forthcoming Palo Alto: A History of California, Capit…

If you pit human rights against security, you're doing foreign policy wrong.  How to think about LGBTQIA-plus rights and strategy.  Being realistic about China-Cambodia relations.  Why Biden is still…

The deep dive on the Philippines presidential election and what it means that they elected Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. Have Democrats become the party of war? Yes, but maybe not for long. Is the right runn…

The realists versus leftists thing, again. Re-imagining international cooperation. Why peace and anti-militarism should be non-partisan. Oligarchs like Elon Musk will be the end of us all.  The curio…