Transcript | Michael Brenes and Van Jackson on Why U.S.-China Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy
This week on Sinica, recorded at Yale University, I speak with Michael Brenes and Van Jackson, coauthors of The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy. Their argument is that framing the U.S.-China relationship as geopolitical rivalry has become more than just a foreign policy orientation — it’s a domestic political project that reshapes budgets, norms, and coalitions in ways that actively harm American democracy and the American people. Rivalry narrows political possibility, makes dissent suspect, encourages neo-McCarthyism (the China Initiative, profiling of Chinese Americans), produces anti-AAPI hate, and redirects public investment away from social welfare and into defense spending through what they call “national security Keynesianism.”
Mike is interim director of the Brady Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, while Van is a senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington and host of the Un-Diplomatic Podcast. We discuss the genesis of their collaboration during the Biden administration, how they navigate China as a puzzle for the American left, canonical misrememberings of the Cold War that distort current China policy, the security dilemma feedback loop between Washington and Beijing, why defense-heavy stimulus is terrible at job creation, how rivalry politics weakens democracy, recent polling showing a shift toward engagement, and their vision for a “geopolitics of peace” anchored in Sino-U.S. détente 2.0.
5:47 – The genesis of the book: recognizing Biden’s Cold War liberalism
11:26 – How they approached writing together from different disciplinary homes
13:20 – Navigating China as a puzzle for the American left
21:39 – How great power competition hardened from analytical framework into ideology
28:15 – Mike on two canonical misrememberings of the Cold War
33:18 – Van on the security dilemma and the nuclear feedback loop
39:55 – National security Keynesianism: why defense spending is bad at job creation
44:38 – How rivalry politics weakens democracy and securitizes dissent
48:09 – Building durable coalitions for restraint-oriented statecraft
51:27 – Has the post-COVID moral panic actually abated?
53:27 – The master narrative we need: a geopolitics of peace
55:29 – Associative balancing: achieving equilibrium through accommodation, not arms
Recommendations:
Van: The Long Twentieth Century by Giovanni Arrighi
Mike: The World of the Cold War: 1945-1991 by Vladislav Zubok
Kaiser: Pluribus (Apple TV series by Vince Gilligan)
Transcript:
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from New Haven, Connecticut, from Yale University.
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Today we are talking about a book that is, I think, first and foremost, well, it’s about America, about the state of American democracy, its political imagination, its working people. The book is The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy. And the authors are Van Jackson and Michael Brenes. And, I’m delighted to actually have them both here today. Their argument is that the framing of the U.S.-China relationship as the geopolitical rivalry has become more than just foreign policy orientation. It’s become a kind of domestic political project.
It’s one that reshapes budgets, norms, and coalitions in ways that actually actively harm America — American democracy, American people. Rivalry narrows the horizon of political possibility. It makes dissent quite suspect. It encourages the kind of McCarthyism, the neo-McCarthyism that we saw with the China Initiative, the profiling of not just Chinese Americans like me, but of anyone with ties to China, also like me. It produces the kind of anti-AAPI hate that we saw spiked during the COVID pandemic. It redirects public investment away from social welfare, away from productive industrial policy, away from public health, away from climate mitigation, away from education, and into things like the defense sector where you’re spending is it’s politically frictionless, even when it is economically inefficient.
This is what the authors call national security Keynesianism. It’s a word which I have now adopted as part of my vocabulary. I deployed it, in fact, earlier this afternoon. It’s this idea that defense spending is going to create economic stimulus and job creation because everything else is politically contested and you can get it through. But the people who lose most in this arrangement, as the authors argue, are working Americans, whose community needs investment, whose living standards are stagnating, and who are given instead a story about foreign threat to explain all their hardship. They also put forth their own vision for what a new American grand strategy could look like, confronting in a way that I found really admirably direct, the fact that America is just addicted to primacy.
So, joining me today on Sinica are the book’s coauthors. Michael Brenes is interim director of the Brady Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale here. We met earlier this year at a conference in Providence at a conference. It was actually on diffusing the U.S.-Chinese military rivalry. Mike gave a fantastic presentation about the book, and I grabbed him right afterward over drinks, and said, “You got to come on the show.” Mike, thanks so much for having me here at Yale. And welcome to Sinica.
Mike Brenes: Oh, it’s a pleasure, Kaiser. And thanks for having me. Longtime fan, first time guest.
Kaiser: Thanks, man. Also joining me from basically as far away as is physically possible on this planet is Van Jackson. Van is a senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington and the prolific author of many, many great articles, not just on his Substack, which is called The Un-Diplomatic Substack, un-diplomatic.com, but in many publications, including Foreign Affairs. He is a podcaster himself who is a regular host at the Un-Diplomatic Podcast, which you should definitely check out. He’s also the author of several really good books, including Grand Strategies of the Left and a book I really enjoyed, The Pacific Power Paradox. I don’t know why I never had you on the show to talk about that book. That was great, but this will have to do. Van, welcome to Sinica. You are both long overdue.
Van Jackson: I appreciate it man. It’s amazing that we’ve only just now connected. And your summary of the rivalry parallel is so complete that I don’t know if we have anything to say. It was so good.
Kaiser: Okay, well, we’ll just wrap it up here. Thanks. Thanks for coming on. Moving on, okay, I do have lots of questions to ask you that I didn’t touch on, but maybe, first, I want to start with the genesis of the book itself, how this came to be. You guys come from very, very different disciplinary homes. Van, you’re an IR guy, security studies. Mike, you’re a historian, you’ve worked a lot on American grand strategy. What was the moment or the conversation where you guys realized you needed to write this book together? I mean, was there a specific policy development or rhetorical turn? This is during the Biden administration. So, some perfidy of the Biden administration that made you guys think we have to write something now.
Mike: So, I remember my first book came out in October of 2020, and Van, generously, was writing for this, I think Duck of Minerva blog, and he recommended my book as like one of the best reads of 2020, which is still very generous of him to do that. And I just sent him a note saying, “Hey, thanks so much. I appreciate it. Long-time fan, and maybe someday we can think about working together.: And this was in the middle of the pandemic.
Kaiser: Yeah, nothing but time.
Mike: And nothing but time in my house. And so, he said, “Yeah, that’d be great. Thanks again for the book.” And months went by, Biden was elected. At that point, we saw Biden’s foreign and domestic policy develop over 2021. And then that, for some reason, led us to go back to one another. I think maybe Van reached out to me, or I reached out to Van, I’m not quite sure who initiated it, but the conversation, I believe, was like, oh, this looks like kind of a version of like Cold War liberalism.
