The Un-Diplomatic Podcast

After George Floyd’s police murder and the Black Lives Matter movement explosion in 2020, the field of international relations rushed to engage the topic of race after ignoring it for half a century. When they did, they largely acted as if early generations of international-relations scholars hadn’t engaged with or theorized the topic. But they had. In this episode, Van sits down with Robbie Shilliam, a multidisciplinary IR scholar and postcolonial theorist, to talk about:What made Hans Morgenthau a theorist of race relations, not just international relations;Why the field of IR has a racial blind spot in the first place;Why IR’s leading journals, editors, and scholars re-engaged racial questions after 2020 but without drawing on what the discipline’s own canonical thinkers had to say about race;Why the Gen Z and Millennial generation of scholars are possibly built differently when it comes to racial issues and historical IR;How the concept of “frontier” unites Republicanism and imperialism in some of the early thinkers of IR like Frederick Jackson Turner, William Allen, and Merze Tate.I was sick as a dog when we recorded this, but it was one of the most generative conversations I’ve ever had on the pod and Robbie is one soulful human being. Hope you enjoy this one!Subscribe to the Un-Diplomatic Newsletter: https://www.un-diplomatic.comRobbie Shilliam, “Republicanism and Imperialism at the Frontier: A Post-Black Lives Matter Archeology of International Relations,” https://robbieshilliam.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/frontier-2.0.pdf.Epeli Hau’ofa, WE ARE THE OCEAN: SELECTED WORKS (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008).

Adom Getachew, a scholar of W.E.B. Du Bois's life and thought, discusses topics such as the global color line and its limits in understanding international relations, Du Bois's views on violence versus pacifism, strategies for making change as a public intellectual, his evolving perspectives on World War I, blind spots on gender equality and imperial Japan, his perspectives on capitalism and Marxism, and why the Cold War prevented many from learning about Du Bois in school.

Have you ever wondered about the political economy of movie-making?Like, why are Hollywood movies globally hegemonic, and why is South Korea its only rival, and why are most foreign countries mere backlots for American studios?What does it have to do with the Netflix-Hulu-Amazon-Disney+ streaming model?Why are the WGA and SAG-AFTRA on strike? What kind of solidarities unite American writers and actors with Korean writers and actors?And what is the future of film?Some really big questions, and US foreign policy plays a role in answering them, remarkably. I sat down with writer/director/producer/editor Kevin Fox to discuss. This was fun!Kevin’s epic tweet thread: https://twitter.com/Michigrimk/status/1695209106921947232Subscribe to the Un-Diplomatic Newsletter: https://www.un-diplomatic.com

In this live show, the speaker explores controversial propositions about US grand strategy, Sino-US rivalry, and the root cause of problems with China. They challenge conventional views on the rivalry, discuss deceptive narratives, analyze China's actions, and discuss the shift towards China hatred in the US. They also examine the challenges of sustaining primacy in a multipolar world.

This episode doesn’t just have a theme, it has a thesis. Have you wondered how precisely the Pentagon manages to siphon so much taxpayer money year after year? How the military-industrial-congressional complex functions in practice? Why US primacy is so expensive yet perpetually in crisis? This episode with William Hartung and Julia Gledhill is something of a tutorial for understanding Pentagon bloat and corruption—which are deeply intertwined. US defense strategy has been hot garbage for, well, as long as I’ve been alive. It’s never been well conceived, sets impossible standards that it uses to request evermore funds when it fails to meet them, and heightens the very threats it aims to guard against. As we discuss in this episode, a key cause of this strategic ineptitude is Pentagon graft and the ability to buy its way out of the kinds of tradeoffs that would impose discipline on strategy-making.Bill and Julia’s piece in The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/pentagon-debt-ceiling-bill/Subscribe to the Un-Diplomatic Newsletter: https://www.un-diplomatic.com

In this cross-over episode with the Security Dilemma podcast, Van speaks with Patrick Fox and John Allen Gay of the John Quincy Adams Society about a range of issues: dissident thinking and intellectual diversity in foreign policy; how to think about China and deterrence; what’s wrong with a "foreign policy for the middle class”; fissures in the progressive movement on foreign policy; and more! Subscribe to the Un-Diplomatic Newsletter: https://www.un-diplomatic.comSubscribe to the Security Dilemma Podcast: https://jqas.org/security-dilemma/John Quincy Adams Society: https://jqas.org

Part II of my conversation with Jonathan Kirshner about his new book, An Unwritten Future: Realism, Uncertainty, and World Politics. Kirshner explains how classical realists think about the “national interest"; distinctions between realist and progressive political economy; what he doesn’t like about the “Thucydides’ Trap,”; the poverty of offensive realism; and how classical realism understands everything from British appeasement of Hitler to the Vietnam War.Subscribe to the Un-Diplomatic Newsletter: https://www.un-diplomatic.com

Part I of my two-part conversation with Jonathan Kirshner about his new book, An Unwritten Future: Realism, Uncertainty, and World Politics. Kirshner explains why classical realism is a misunderstood intellectual tradition. We get into: Why realism recruits dead people into their intellectual tradition; what we can learn from Thucydides, and why an armchair understanding of the Peloponnesian War does more harm than good; why realist pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy; why international relations has somewhat lost its way; how we should think about the “national interest"; and distinctions between realist and progressive political economy.Subscribe to the Un-Diplomatic Newsletter: https://www.un-diplomatic.com

What's the difference between centered and de-centered international orders? How do small states navigate geopolitics without becoming pawns? What does it look like to have a world in which there is no hegemon, and how is it sustained? And why was 15th century maritime Southeast Asia a different international order than the Sino-centric "tributary system" in what is now Northeast Asia? Dr. Manjeet Pardesi joins the show to share new research that sheds light on all these questions and more. A tour-de-force of historical international relations, what it means to take a relational view of world politics, and small-state strategies in Asia. Subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.un-diplomatic.comManjeet's article in Global Studies Quarterly (open access!): https://academic.oup.com/isagsq/article/2/4/ksac072/6947856 

What's wrong with liberal hegemony? What does it mean for New Zealand to have an "independent foreign policy?" Why did New Zealand's Prime Minister recently visit China? And why are the interests of New Zealand's leading dairy supplier far from the same thing as the interests of the nation? In this cross-over episode, Van sits down with the good folks at the 1 of 200 Podcast to discuss an unusual intersection of US foreign policy pathologies with those of New Zealand.Subscribe to the newsletter: https://www.un-diplomatic.comListen to the 1 of 200 Podcast: https://www.1of200.nz/podcastKyle Church on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KyleDChurchBranko Marcetic on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BMarchetich