The bootlicking class of Munich Security Conference attendees see the demands of American fascism as an opportunity to substitute military spending for public investment, bolstered by a reactionary imperialist identity politics as a unifying ideology. www.un-diplomatic.com/p/bootlickin...

The bootlicking class of Munich Security Conference attendees see the demands of American fascism as an opportunity to substitute military spending for public investment, bolstered by a reactionary imperialist identity politics as a unifying ideology. www.un-diplomatic.com/p/bootlickin...

“Marco Rubio proves it doesn’t matter if you’re ethnically Cuban; if you lie about history and brag about empire as if it was something you accomplished, you too might be a dirty sock puppet of fleeting convenience for white supremacy and oligarchy. Tío Thomas.” www.un-diplomatic.com/p/bootlickin...

“Marco Rubio proves it doesn’t matter if you’re ethnically Cuban; if you lie about history and brag about empire as if it was something you accomplished, you too might be a dirty sock puppet of fleeting convenience for white supremacy and oligarchy. Tío Thomas.” www.un-diplomatic.com/p/bootlickin...

There’s never been a more relevant time to revisit Grand Strategies of the Left

AOC asked what is peace and she invokes structural violence, distinction between negative and positive peace. The core concept underneath a progressive foreign policy

AOC on progressive foreign policy and why she bothered with Munich

The Rosetta Stone for AOC’s foreign policy right here: “...economic elites are taking the lion's share of growth for themselves and leaving crumbs for the working class...this is an injustice, you are being screwed, and that story is not a cultural one but a class one”

Minnesota defeating ICE reflects the best of what we know about repression politics. But there’s a dark lining to those insights www.un-diplomatic.com/p/the-politi...

Minnesota defeating ICE reflects the best of what we know about repression politics. But there’s a dark lining to those insights www.un-diplomatic.com/p/the-politi...

David Cortright—a leading peace intellectual—thinks the world is ripe for a new generation of peace activism. Great episode explaining why www.un-diplomatic.com/p/peace-acti...

Homelessness is built into an economy that’s completely hostage to asset inflation and the permanent war economy. That’s why neither government nor billionaire philanthropists spend the relative pittance it would take to solve the problem

Catalog of attempts to cut defense spending in the 1960s

Look, this is not as complicated as people would like to make it seem. The twin root sources of global insecurity right now are transnational oligarchy and the permanent war economy (primarily the US’s), which 1) need each other and 2) combine to produce imperialism...

Munich attendee: Should we re-evaluate military aid to Israel? AOC: “The idea of completely unconditional aid--no matter what one does--does not make sense. I think it enabled a genocide in Gaza”

AOC💪at the Munich Security Conference: “In a rules-based order, hypocrisy is vulnerability...kidnapping heads of state, threatening allies, colonizing Greenland, or looking the other way on a genocide”

"The worker-forsaking nature of US foreign policy (most countries’ foreign policies) reflects a class blind spot” www.un-diplomatic.com/p/working-cl...

"The worker-forsaking nature of US foreign policy (most countries’ foreign policies) reflects a class blind spot” www.un-diplomatic.com/p/working-cl...

“You want to do what’s in the common good, and you have a naïve sense that signing up and following orders is the way to do it...But then you get in the system and find that...Your buddies are getting PTSD and committing suicide for depraved abstractions.” www.un-diplomatic.com/p/working-cl...

“The world is broken, and the US is a direct threat to Europe…Even European elites grasp that now…even Euro-hawks are likely to find AOC quite appealing in certain respects, though pandering to them should not be a priority” open.substack.com/pub/undiplom...

Why is America declining? Why is the US engaged in predatory behavior abroad? And if we’re past the era of neoliberal globalization, what is US decline ushering in its stead? open.substack.com/pub/undiplom...

Not sure it penetrated the bubble here but Tom Malinowski just lost in NJ because he had previously taken votes to support and fund ICE…just like most Democrat incumbents. 2026 is going to have lots of surprises for the Nate Silver, Yglesias, Rahm Emmanuel wing of the party

Really relished this episode on Demolition Man (1993), which depicted a simultaneously dystopian and utopian LA in ways that proved very prescient www.bangbangpod.com/p/demolition...

Never thought I would have a plum tree. So juicy

"Even the oligarchs think we should be in the streets with pitchforks; they’re just confident we won’t bother because we’re drunk on consumption.” www.un-diplomatic.com/p/my-hip-hop...

Jiu jitsu highlights from the weekend--armbars, flower sweep, leg entries from k-guard

Jiu jitsu puts everything else in perspective

“Even the oligarchs think we should be in the streets with pitchforks; they’re just confident we won’t bother because we’re drunk on consumption.” open.substack.com/pub/undiplom...

🚨New episode! —How the Pentagon is facilitating 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. www.un-diplomatic.com/p/the-end-of...

Watching Canadian Bacon for the pod and OMG, I enjoyed this film when I was a kid but I did not grasp how political it was. Also foreshadowed a lot about politics now

Everyone knows the Game of Thrones quote “Chaos is a ladder,” quote, and it’s true, but that’s not enlightening enough. They want to profit from dehumanization, unsettling geopolitics. This is the age of primitive accumulation and it sucks www.un-diplomatic.com/p/epstein-ge...

The domestic repression that Americans are experiencing is the counterpart to US imperialist geopolitics abroad. All of this flows from the permanent war economy, and if you don’t do anything about that, then most of us are going to die and it’s that simple www.un-diplomatic.com/p/imperialis...

Everyone knows the Game of Thrones quote “Chaos is a ladder,” quote, and it’s true, but that’s not enlightening enough. They want to profit from dehumanization, unsettling geopolitics. This is the age of primitive accumulation and it sucks www.un-diplomatic.com/p/epstein-ge...

I had never seen Three Days of the Condor and it was wild. Aside from seeing New York in the ‘70s, it was quaint that you could have a plot where revealing government corruption and a CIA oil plot might actually bring down US empire www.bangbangpod.com/p/three-days...

Epstein to Thiel: “as I said in your office…finding things on their way to collapse was much easier than finding the next bargain.” Primitive accumulation smoking gun open.substack.com/pub/undiplom...

My thoughts after Tooze on Ezra Klein: “cycles of hegemony are only identifiable within capitalism itself...I believe, and it seems Tooze believes, that what we’re entering into is...a world in which even China cannot deign to become global hegemon.” www.un-diplomatic.com/p/adam-tooze...

Honestly I had no idea Minnesotans were built like this. Gives hope

As Ta-Nehisi Coates recently said, it turns out culture war is also actual war. ACT wanted to reinterpret the Treaty--esp Article 2--not as pure right-wing identity politics, but because a restricted interpretation of the Treaty would ease the sale of natural resources to the US

An interesting commentary by @vanjackson.bsky.social on Tooze's observations in Klein's podcast. The post's last footnote alone is worth the [time] price of admission.

My thoughts after Tooze on Ezra Klein: “cycles of hegemony are only identifiable within capitalism itself...I believe, and it seems Tooze believes, that what we’re entering into is...a world in which even China cannot deign to become global hegemon.” www.un-diplomatic.com/p/adam-tooze...

@seva.bsky.social joins the pod to talk about Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's groundbreaking speech at the World Economic Forum--the most profound international relations speech by a head of state in 50 years www.un-diplomatic.com/p/the-ruptur...

This would put New Zealand on the wrong—and most perilous—side of the defining global trend of our time. Bootlicking isn’t just an affect; it has consequences for the rest of us

Just how bloody is drone warfare? New data from the Russia-Ukraine war reveals casualties on the order of World War I, with very little to show for it in terms of territorial conquest. www.un-diplomatic.com/p/us-far-rig...

Was reading this really insightful piece about the tech obsession with Greenland and the network state, then find myself quoted at the end! jacobin.com/2026/01/gree...

“The idea that you can perpetually maintain a favorable balance of power is a reactionary myth; an evidence-less logic that justifies arms-racing.” open.substack.com/pub/undiplom...

Scaremongering about competition from China will not save the Big 3–they must be nationalized or they won’t survive

Minneapolis has seen a stunning 1,646% spike in calls from families who can't pay rent because they're afraid to leave their homes to work. This is state violence manufacturing housing precarity in real time. People should not be facing eviction when their city is under occupation.

Great conceptual analysis of militarism. If I ever meet these Bryan Maybee or Srdjan Vucetic guys, I’ll buy them a coffee journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Excellent breakdown with @vanjackson.bsky.social & @seva.bsky.social. youtu.be/M6i5PCc-t2E?...

I decided long ago that confronting militarism required this habit of extreme focus on the clues the powerful leave. But the ritual of digging through their word vomit is starting to become farcical in a world where facts and reason have almost no weight. open.substack.com/pub/undiplom...