Professor Alfred McCoy is the Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He specialises in the history of the Philippines, US foreign policy, European colonisation of Southeast Asia, illegal drug trade, and Central Intelligence Agency covert operations. In this conversation we talk about run-ins with the CIA, world order and empire over the past 500 years, the duality of raw power and principle, the fading of US empire and the rise of China, as well as the prospects for world order in a context of climate breakdown. Al McCoy can be found here: https://history.wisc.edu/people/mccoy-alfred-w/ His essays for Tom Dispatch are available here: https://tomdispatch.com/authors/alfredmccoy/ We discussed: The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (1972): https://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/politics-of-heroin--the-products-9781556524837.php A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (2006): https://history.wisc.edu/publications/a-question-of-torture-cia-interrogation-from-the-cold-war-to-the-war-on-terror/ In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (2017): https://history.wisc.edu/publications/in-the-shadows-of-the-american-century-the-rise-and-decline-of-us-global-power/ To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change (2021): https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1742-to-govern-the-globe