A viral Chinese meme imagines Americans one mishap away from ruin, while American influencers fantasize about China as a frictionless techno-utopia. Each reveals less about reality than about shared economic anxieties.

DC desperately wants third countries’ support against China, but it always fails because it doesn’t actually care about them. The US could “compete”, but ironically only if people for whom geopolitical conflict is irrelevant or unwanted were in charge. carnegieendowment.org/emissary/202...

Progressive internationalism usually doesn't directly address the issues that are most salient to the majority of people but Trump is doing his very best to solve this problem www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

feeling like we're in some of those weeks where decades are happening

Chinese government bonds emerge as lone war haven ft.trib.al/elDzXLR

lol www.axios.com/2026/04/01/j...

Exciting new adventures in FAFO?

As dumb as Trump’s execution has been, let’s not forget that a big chunk of the foreign policy elite spent the last decade baying for war with Iran. They got to be Very Serious People all those years even as they were calling for something that would likely cause Hormuz closure and economic chaos

Pentagon preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran, Washington Post reports reut.rs/4bEv17L

The centrist attack on Hasan Piker might create some temporary headaches for progressives but I would bet it will just end up backfiring. Have they thought this through?

I cannot stress enough how these are PTA moms and soccer coach dads and I can best describe the vibe as “festively bloodthirsty”

This narrative has been thoroughly debunked and people like Burns should know better by now but they just can’t give it up www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Progressive International is promoting this article on twitter again and I cannot overstate how terrible it is progressive.international/blueprint/cb...

UAE pushes for international force to reopen Hormuz ft.trib.al/fVr8lbL

it's quagmire season now we've got a reason to get a big war I need a big war give me a big war

Starting to feel like quagmire season

Breaking: The Pentagon is weighing sending an additional 10,000 ground troops to the Middle East.

One of the most important figures in US and global finance just dropped an exciting new prowar capitalist argument: The war on Iran must escalate to regime change, which would yield "abundance and growth", otherwise we're doomed to a lengthy global recession www.businessinsider.com/blackrock-ce...

A relative of mine in the US is worried that our family members who are doctors in Tehran are more likely to be killed due to the fact that they save people’s lives for a living. This is the association that people now make with the US and Israel. A stain on our collective conscience.

Would not surprise me if others were nodding along outside the DPRK. Trump, for all his supposed concern about nuclear war, is making proliferation look pretty attractive.

This is not a concession. They've said all along that they don't intend to build nuclear weapons and the intelligence community has repeatedly assessed the same! I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. nypost.com/2026/03/24/u...

"The Left has trenchant critiques of the racism and exploitation inherent in both variants of Washington’s imperial project. But we won’t win the majority of people to our side if we don’t go beyond critique to offer a positive vision" convergencemag.com/articles/say...

look I don't want to count my chickens or downplay the extent to which the right has fascist aspirations. but if the GOP had an unassailable, undetectable election rigging strategy - or the juice to openly do the detectable kind - you do kind of suspect they would've started here

Discovering the critical public sphere is about being treated dismissively when your arguments are not up to snuff and turning to full automation as a response…as an origin story it’s not bad.

We worked hard, organized, and built a big coalition, but we couldn’t compete with the millions of dollars from Trump-aligned super PACs in this race. We may have lost this battle, but we're going to keep fighting until we beat Trump and build a better world that we know is possible.

I’m glad AIPAC didn’t sweep Illinois

My new piece tries to make sense of how the fantasy Axis of [Something Bad] caught on in DC despite being very silly. China seems weak because it can’t defend the (imaginary) Axis, so the Blob thinks that open aggression could work if they were at the helm. responsiblestatecraft.org/axis-of-auth...

Scenario: Dems retake the WH, but progressives are once again locked out of foreign policy. The Dem natsec establishment does more war, splitting the base, again. MAGA returns with a new antiwar image supported by a stab-in-the-back myth about Trump, which is already under construction

Nicholas Mulder: "Instead of averting military action, sanctions are now just as frequently paving the way to violent escalation. A world of persistent economic wars will, sooner or later, spiral into actual warfare." www.ft.com/content/ae45...

The esoteric reading

The most grotesque case of economic coercion under Trump: holding HIV treatment and debt relief for Zambia hostage in exchange for critical minerals, the one aspect of "great power competition" with China that the Trump admin is taking somewhat seriously www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/h...

Persuasive from Trita Parsi. There's no reason for Iran to accept a ceasefire, given the results of the last one. The US might like the war to end but lacks the capacity to negotiate a real peace agreement. And Israel just wants the war to go on as long as possible. newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

Plato's Phaedrus, 4th Century BCE

I think this "joke" to nuke a new canal through the Middle East is deeply irresponsible, coming from a China hawk and policy influencer with incredible reach within the Trump and Biden administrations. The disclaimer doesn't help when Newt Gingrich is retweeting this. www.chinatalk.media/p/its-time

Imagine how funny would it be if Xi agreed to deploy the navy

‘Trump said he was also expecting China to help unblock the strait before he travels to Beijing at the end of this month for a summit with Xi Jinping, his first trip to China in his second term.’

Trump officials presumably hoping to get a chance to support a coup

US hegemony was already in decline and none of the careful liberal internationalists could save it which is what made Trump possible. There is hauntingly beautiful irony on both sides, very dialectical

Haitian woman, 31, dies alone at Pittsburgh bus stop days after ICE released her to the streets far from home to perish. Rest in power, Daphy Michel: migrantinsider.com/p/the-loneso...

Jews head into Shabbat with apprehension & devastation after antisemitic attacks on synagogues in Michigan, Toronto, and Belgium. Fear and grief can be exceedingly lonely experiences. But we are not alone. We are all too aware that the fear many of us feel right now is shared by our Muslim cousins.

Working in a coffee shop and a liberal imperialist next to me is talking about the promise of regime change and restoring capitalism in Cuba and I didn't bring my noise cancelling headphones today

Some good commentary on this from 5 years ago by Christian Sorace, contrasting this turn towards forced assimilation with the Maoist rejection of "great Han chauvinism" madeinchinajournal.com/2020/09/25/u...

Thinking about this quote from Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi again.

"Having lost clean energy races to China in technologies like solar and batteries, Europe risks being leapfrogged in green steel progress. The possibility of China developing its own DRI technology shouldn’t be discounted." ieefa.org/resources/mo...

"...there is no time for admiration; get busy right away at the task of imitating him. The ethical truth of the matter is just this—that admiration is suspiciously like an evasion." (Kierkegaard)

An attack on liberal arts education (stop stop it’s already dead) from Biden’s Commerce Secretary www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/o...

This quote distills, better than any other, this administration. Its aesthetic: the most bombastic and brainless action movie, with the most hackneyed script writing. Its psychology: sadistic gratification in domination, with particular pleasure beating those who are helpless.

Reuters Exclusive "U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls' school." "The strike would rank among the worst cases of civilian casualties in decades of U.S. conflicts in the ​Middle East."

US leaders regret allowing China to escape poverty and get on a plausible path to prosperity and they intend not to repeat that mistake anywhere else. US national security requires that the global south stay poor and weak forever www.bloomberg.com/news/article...