This week, our guest is Daniel Bessner, Associate Professor in American Foreign Policy in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. We discuss Trump, American empire, Washington’s Asian fixation, and the possibility of “mutual ruin of the contending classes” among other subjects.
This week, our guest is Daniel Bessner, Associate Professor in American Foreign Policy in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. We discuss Trump, American empire, Washington’s Asian fixation, and the possibility of “mutual ruin of the contending classes” among other subjects.
*The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
**The first twelve episodes of this podcast were published by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Peter Slezkine: Hi, I'm Peter Slezkine, Director of the Monterey Trialogue, a program hosted by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Since the middle of the 20th century, relations among the United States, Russia, and China have had an enormous impact on each country separately and on the world as a whole. The purpose of the Monterey Trialogue is to better understand these extraordinarily complex and consequential relationship by directly engaging with experts from all three countries.
My guest today is Daniel Bessner, Associate Professor in American Foreign Policy in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and a contributing editor at Jacobin. He is the author of Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual, published in 2018 by Cornell University Press. He has published pieces in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Republic, The Nation, n+1, and Harper's Magazine. Finally, he is co-host of American Prestige, a fantastic podcast on foreign affairs, to which everyone should subscribe.
Daniel, welcome to the show.
[00:01:09] Daniel Bessner: Thank you very much for having me.
[00:01:12] Peter Slezkine: So, I just gave the professional bio. But let's begin with the personal bio. Where did you grow up? What did your parents do? How did you end up deciding to do a Ph.D. in history?
[00:01:23] Daniel Bessner: Sure! So, I spent most of my childhood in Rockaway, Queens, which is on the outskirts of New York City. My father ran a small electrical supply store that his father had founded. And then, he would go into Manhattan, so become aware of intellectual culture there. My father was also a very big reader. We would get, like, The New York Review of Books delivered. And so, I think that just made me interested in intellectual culture.
I went to Jewish Day School, which is a lot of learning, you know. You learn the Talmud, you learn Aramaic, you learn modern Hebrew, you learn biblical Hebrew. So, pretty significant intellectual work at a young age. And then I was always interested in history in high school. I got into it, like, I'm sure many people did, through the Nazis in World War II. I found the Nazis’ rise to power to be very, very, interesting. It's funny, I've been reading about that for, like, 30 years, which makes me so annoyed with the whole fascism thing. The people who talk about it just don't know anything about, like, what actually that looked like. But that's another story for another time.
[00:02:21] Peter Slezkine: But you were interested in the way that all the viewers of the history channel are? Because this is the seminal moment and the Nazis are the most dramatic bad guy? Or was there, like, a…
[00:02:29] Daniel Bessner: No, I mean, it's just incredibly interesting.
[00:02:31] Peter Slezkine: Jewish angle to this?
[00:02:32] Daniel Bessner: Actually, I wasn't as interested in the Holocaust part of the equation or the impression of the Jews part. Obviously, it is very interesting and very important, relevant to my own identity. But I always found the period of the ‘20s and the political maneuvering of the Nazis to be a very interesting thing. Going from a genuinely very small movement to the height of the German state, and then obviously using that for terrible purposes, it was always very interesting to me. I remember I read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer very early on. The most fascinating parts were, like, the early life of Hitler into the 20s, you know, teens and 20s, because I think those set the conditions for what came later. Also, what came later is very interesting. And I did a lot of reading, of course, on the ‘30s and in World War II and the military history of that.
So, I was interested in that. I was interested in history. I majored in modern European history in college. And then, when I was in college, the Iraq War broke out. My senior year of college, I interned for the Council on Foreign Relations, which made me even more interested in foreign policy. So, then I went to, actually, Middlebury Deutsche Language Schule in summer 2007, undergraduate school in the autumn of 2007. So, the rest is history, as it were, literally and figuratively.
[00:03:45] Peter Slezkine: So, we're both in Washington. I'm in Washington, D.C. You're in Washington State. Quite far away from the beltway, but you are still part of the American foreign policy world, in some respects, host of a foreign policy podcast. You have opinions about foreign policy and publish them in prominent outlets, and you are involved with a think tank in Washington, D.C.
[00:04:08] Daniel Bessner: Yeah.
[00:04:08] Peter Slezkine: So, could you, perhaps, describe the American foreign policy ecosystem as you see it and where you fit into it individually?
[00:04:18] Daniel Bessner: Sure. I mean, the ecosystem is just basically bipartisan consensus, for the most part, that there's not that much difference between a Brookings or a Council on Foreign Relations or Center for Strategic International Studies and the various other think tanks. There are some outliers, like the Institute for Policy Studies, the Cato Institute's Foreign Policy Division, but, you know, it's mostly Atlantic Council type stuff, post-World War II, Cold War, liberal, bipartisan consensus.
And I stand, us, along with the Quincy Institute, which is probably the most prominent of the not-blobby think tanks that is basically advocating a policy of restraint, probably, on the left wing of the Quincy Institute. I'm pretty radical in my restraint. Pretty much everyone at Quincy believes the United States should not be as involved in the Middle East, but there are disagreements about what the United States should do, for example, vis-a-vis China. You have someone like Mearsheimer who thinks the United States should confront China. And then you have someone like me who thinks that's a fantasy and ridiculous.
So, that is, sort of, the left and the right of the Quincy Institute. But within the firmament, it's certainly heterodox and on the outside of the present consensus.
[00:05:24] Peter Slezkine: But so, if the blob really is one homogeneous creature, then, is there really room for heterodoxy? I mean, how can you penetrate the blob? Is that the point? What is your intervention? And how effective is it?
[00:05:40] Daniel Bessner: I mean, it hasn't been effective, very clearly. I mean, you could even see by Trump's appointments where, you see, like, Marco Rubio or Mike Waltz or other people who are appointed to these influential foreign policy positions are basically primacists. Whether it could be influential would probably have to be over the long run. It would probably have to be a moment when… well, there's two paths. One, that there's some shift in imagination and people recognize that the United States, not only shouldn't morally and ethically be the world empire, but probably won't be able to, and therefore you should start doing things like drawing down security commitments around the world.
I don't think that world's going to happen. I think that China will do something like try to invade Taiwan. And you'll have someone be like, “Should we fight World War III over this?” Hopefully, the answer will be no. And then you'll have a scrambling when all the other people who didn't see this obvious thing coming will pretend to be perplexed, or maybe genuinely be perplexed, which is sad and tragic. And then you'll probably have, you know, a circulation of elites, as it were. That could happen in five years, that could happen in 15 years. So, yeah, it's probably unlikely in the medium term that things are going to go in any radical new direction. That would be my analytical take.
[00:06:48] Peter Slezkine: So, early in the first Trump administration, you wrote an article for The New York Times suggesting that the left should get its act together in the foreign policy arena and come up with an outline, at least, for what they mean to do in the world. So, how did that go? And now that we're at Trump part two, does this help that project along? Does this take down the Clinton, Biden, Obama, liberal, democratic wing and open the door for thinking on this subject again among progressives? Or are progressives now so focused on Trump that there's basically no prospect for the construction of a positive program?
[00:07:28] Daniel Bessner: It's difficult to know. I mean, what's clear is that recent history suggests that DNC is not exactly interested in self-reformation, that there's been a professionalization of the people who run the Democratic Party. I think, objectively, liberalism is in crisis, and objectively, the Democratic Party has failed on numerous levels to either actually make the lives of the majority of Americans, let alone working class Americans, better. But what that means subjectively is, I don't know. I mean, it very well could just be we keep trundling along into the mutual ruin of the contending classes. That seems to be what we're going to do.
[00:08:00] Peter Slezkine: But is Trump's election a serious blow to the liberal internationalist paradigm as it has existed?
[00:08:07] Daniel Bessner: One would think. I mean, objectively, yes, but how it's interpreted, no. Well, how it's interpreted TBD. Clearly, obviously, right, obviously, people aren't buying what the Democrats are selling, whether it comes to the terms of the international order, whether it comes to terms of their domestic political economic positions. I mean, you had all that nonsense about, like, actually, the macroeconomic indicators are great, you're pocketbook is lying to you. I mean, that's just bullshit. No one believes that.
Whether they'll do the transformation necessary to win elections in the future, I don't know. Are we in such an era of degradation that we'll essentially just see a swing between parties because both parties are unable to do anything useful? I mean, I don't think Trump's going to save the working class or reform the international order in an anti-imperial way. So, we might just see it back to the Democrats, back to the Republicans, back to Democrats, back to Republicans. If recent history is indicative, that is, what we're probably going to see. I mean, I think from a macro-historical perspective, we might very well have lost 100-plus years ago. Once nationalism proved more powerful than class identity as a driver of decisions, the state is now, perhaps, too complex to actually take over and put in a different direction, to put it colloquially, maybe Skynet has become self-aware, and we're not actually able to control things. I mean, that's Marx's big worry, right? He's like, you become so alienated from the system that the system essentially takes on a mind of its own. That might be the case.
[00:09:30] Peter Slezkine: Wait, so you said that we lost 100 years ago and then mentioned Marx. So, let's position you properly. So, you are a self-described Marxist, right, more or less. Or would you choose a different label?
[00:09:40] Daniel Bessner: I think a Marxist perspective is a good starting point for analysis, if not the end point of analysis. I think the idea of historical materialism, the flat out predictions he made about how capitalism functions turned out to be mostly correct, that who owns the means of production is important, and that base and superstructure exist in a mutually reinforcing relationship, but that the base is a more important causal force in history than the superstructure.
Marxianism certainly informs my worldview, but it's, I mean, it's obviously a long time later. So, you know, there's been a lot of amendations to the Marxist tradition and a lot of different types of intellectual thought that shapes me. For example, I'm very shaped by classical realism of the 1950s, even if I take it in a different direction. I'm very familiar with liberal thought and liberal philosophy. I mean, a part of me is even small “c” conservative. I very much take the Hayekian, Misesian perspective on social science and its ontological limits. Fundamentally, the American progressive vision of using social science in a direct way to manage the world is an impossibility. And that's really one of the foundations of the idea of American global leadership.
[00:10:58] Peter Slezkine: Well, let's get to the origins or original sins of the American empire, then. So, when would you date the origin of the American empire? And I understand that we can go back to the very beginning. And it has taken on many forms.
[00:11:10] Daniel Bessner: I mean, I actually would date it to the very beginning. It's necessarily an expansionist project. Whether you're talking about indigenous dispossession in even the pre-national period, to whether you're talking about claiming the entirety of the Western Hemisphere with the Monroe Doctrine, to you're going extra hemispheric with the Spanish-American War, to you're going global, really, by that, what people really mean is dominating Europe.
After World War II, I think there's almost a teleological narrative that one can tell that Castro's something true about this never ending expansionism of the protestant, millenarian American empire that began when John Winthrop announced it in 1630. It's necessarily an expansionist polity. And I think there's a real protestant almost metaphysical core to that, embedded within the American project.
[00:11:56] Peter Slezkine: You had Charlie Kupchan on your show. Recently, we had him on a few weeks ago. You reject the traditional division between isolationism and internationalism, that there was a break either with Wilson or World War II.
[00:12:09] Daniel Bessner: No, it’s empirically wrong. I mean, like, these guys just haven't read the books. You know, it's like they have not kept up with the literature. They're literally repeating arguments from the ‘80s and the ‘90s. Very obviously, the United States was never isolationist, unless you discount native peoples in the Western Hemisphere. You can't do that. So, the United States is not isolationist. It was isolationist vis-a-vis political military commitment to Europe. And even that is not really correct. If you look at the 1920s, when there was a lot of political economic entanglements between the United States and Europe, it's essentially a liberal claim that is, sort of, justifying the notion that the United States, “didn't want to become an empire, but it was forced upon us,” which is frankly bullshit. And the empirical record doesn't support it.
[00:12:52] Peter Slezkine: No, but you can say that isolationism, very crudely defined, is a myth, while also we’re arguing that there was a very significant political rupture in the mid-20th century. So, like, our friend, Stephen Wertheim, who attacks the notion of isolationism as an illusion or an invention for political purposes, also claims that everything changed in 1941 and the U.S. has been set on this path ever since. So, both things can be true.
[00:13:17] Daniel Bessner: Yeah, I don't think everything changed. I would just say it's part of a longer process, right, that there's a very clear line you could draw between the conquest of Trans-Appalachia and the global domination of the second half of the 20th century, that they're actually not that distinct.
[00:13:32] Peter Slezkine: But so, do you not think that the U.S. is peculiar? I mean, the conquest of Trans-Appalachia seems very similar to, I don't know, what English settler, colonial populations were doing in South Africa and Australia. And those two places did not end up anything like the U.S.
[00:13:49] Daniel Bessner: Well, the U.S. always had land. That was the big difference. The U.S. always had more land. And the U.S. was able to do things like take pressure off class conflict by giving people land. I think that's the fundamental difference between the conquest of a Rhodesia or a South Africa. But I mean, there's also similarities that could be drawn. You know, you could draw similarities between Australia, you could draw it between Israel, you could draw it between South Africa and, again, in Rhodesia with the settler colonial thing.
The U.S. was different, you know, like, all of them were different in their own special ways. And what made the U.S. difference to me is that there was a base and then there's a ton of land for the most of the expansionary period. Then, after World War II, you replace the lack of land with the social programs in favor of home ownership, which has gone away. So, what's unique about the present moment is that, like, a little bit the American dream is no longer considered to be in reach for many, many people, and I think that is part of the reason for our political sclerosis.
[00:14:44] Peter Slezkine: But it seems like, at least, the Trump wing that is resonating quite widely in the electorate is focused on the continent that Americans conquered.
[00:14:54] Daniel Bessner: This is lies, though. I mean, yeah, it's just lying. They're just venal kleptocrats who are going to just use the office to enrich themselves, but they're saying shit that resonates with voters. I mean, I really think it's that simple.
I was writing about Trump for a bit, but it's like not that interesting. There's nothing really there. I think that's one of the reasons that people, like, have to find analogy, because, like, Trump himself is not that interesting. He's just like a New York plutocrat and he acts like a New York plutocrat. He's not, like, deeply embedded in Nazi ideology, or even the ideology of paleoconservatism.
[00:15:29] Peter Slezkine: But he's also not simply a New York plutocrat. We saw one election cycle ago the Bloomberg phenomenon that did not last very long, so it's not as if these New York plutocrats are fungible.
[00:15:42] Daniel Bessner: Well, this is how… I know you're not a New Yorker, Peter, because there's a big difference between Mike Bloomberg from Baltimore, I believe, but who really made his career in Manhattan, and Queen's Donald Trump. I mean, these are, like, micro New York differences that actually say a lot about the type of culture that someone comes from.
But I get your points. Obviously, there is… there are ideas there, is what I would say. There's ideas that don't form a coherent ideology, like, the idea that you don't get fucked in business, you don't let people take over, take advantage of you, strength is good, bullshitting is good, going a million miles an hour and not stopping is good. So, there are, like, sort of, 1980s Michael Douglas’ Wall Street ideas about how to govern oneself. It's not Nazism. It's not fascism. It's not Bonapartism or whatever nonsense thing people have turned to. It's just a ‘80s guy from Queens who's also, like, pretty charismatic and naturally funny because he's a bully. I think, like, that basically explains the Trump appeal, because there's an anti-systemic quality to that, that I think voters find attractive.
[00:16:48] Peter Slezkine: So, that's important. So, Trump may be a vehicle for that. Bernie Sanders and Trump both emerged at the same time. The moment was right and their messages resonated in different ways, but to overlapping portions of the electorate. So, that this doesn't reflect any changes in the American empire seems strange to me. In Europe, within this Western World or the bounds of the American Empire, there clearly is some kind of political upheaval. There is distaste for the establishment across the board. And this hasn't necessarily been true throughout our lifetimes. There have been revolts against the, sort of, liberal order in various ways, from the inside and the outside, but now there seems to be a moment where it is really under internal and external assault. Whether it will continue and survive is another question.
[00:17:37] Daniel Bessner: Honestly, to be decided. We'll have to see what happens, but if the first term is any indication, not much is going to change, which leads to my worry that these institutions are running on autopilot, but they have so consolidated power that they're actually extraordinarily difficult to change. It's almost a question of political development. You could do something like the Bolsheviks did in Russia, you could do what the Italian fascists did, you could do what the Nazis did, because states weren't that developed. They were relatively simple and primitive forms that one could actually take control of.
The story of the last hundred years, which is not that many people actually focus on, I'm not sure there's even a job in American political development, but the state has become incredibly complex. Not only has it become incredibly complex, it does not have one locus of power. It has many loci of power. Not only that, these aren't even necessarily public institutions. In the United States, as you well know, we have military, industrial, and military intellectual complexes. There's this public, private thing.
It's not even the state, you know. It's the deep parastate. So, it might just be like you can't capture the state in the 2020s like you could before, right? And maybe that's good if you have a Trump and it would be bad if you had a Bernie, right? Because you would need someone like an FDR to issue 3,000 executive orders, right? The next FDR would basically just be like, “I'm a dictator. Here's 5,000 executive orders. Deal with it, you courts.” Maybe you determine that the ERA is unconstitutional in four years, but we get four years of the ERA, right? Like, that's the type of thing you'd have to test out. But no one who is going to rise to that position is going to do that because we have become so, basically, oligo archives, you know. You went to an Ivy, right? You went to Columbia. Did you go to Columbia, too?
[00:19:21] Peter Slezkine: Well, for the graduate school, yeah.
[00:19:33] Daniel Bessner: Where did you do your undergrad?
[00:19:34] Peter Slezkine: University of Chicago. So, we thought we were different.
[00:19:26] Daniel Bessner: So, Ivy minus. Just kidding. But you and I are both products of these systems. We know how they work. They cycle people into and out of the elite in order to rise to that position. It's like the old Chomsky argument. You wouldn't be in that chair if you didn't think what you were saying was true. There's a general truth there and it just might not be possible to actually do things like take over the state.
[00:19:47] Peter Slezkine: Yeah. Well, okay, that's fine. The old leftist revolutionary framework is no longer applicable.
[00:19:55] Daniel Bessner: But the reformist framework isn't applicable either, right? This might be the tragedy.
[00:20:00] Peter Slezkine: If we look at this whole thing, not just as a complicated state or parastate but as an empire, to use the, sort of, left wing critical term.
[00:20:10] Daniel Bessner: I would say it's not left wing anymore. You read diplomatic history. I mean, centrists and liberals and on the right, the empire is now accepted by historians as the reality. I don't think that's left wing in the 2020s anymore. I actually think that's an important point. That it is, that is consensus that the United States is an empire in a way it wasn't in 1995. Even maybe 2005. That's a change.
[00:20:32] Peter Slezkine: Well, can you define it, then? What is the American empire? What does it matter to call it an empire as opposed to a hegemon or some other alternative?
[00:20:39] Daniel Bessner: Well, I think there's a valence to it, how it governs through force and not consensus. I mean, that's basically the difference between leader, hegemon, and empire. It's the degree to which it is through force and not consensus, right? That you know you're a Colombian guy, you know the empire by invitation argument that everyone loved. But I think what the historiography, over the last 10, 15 years, has shown is that it was hardly that for most of the world. So, when on balance, you're looking at what the United States did to most of the world. It was an empire of domination and force. Whether you're talking about Korea, whether you're talking about Vietnam, whether you're talking about the 66 times it tried to overthrow a foreign regime, blah, blah, blah, you know the argument. You can even look at the engram. The engram changes in, like, the mid-2000s. The term, “American Empire,” shoots up, because I think, in the midst of Iraq and Afghanistan, it became a little less possible to claim that the United States was this benevolent leader, which it looks when you're looking at Western Europe, American relations in the 1940s and beyond.
[00:21:34] Peter Slezkine: So, globalization, which is a complicated process, mostly driven by the U.S., the American empire, which is the largest and most powerful in human history, they don't have a clear set of levers that any reformers or revolutionaries could get hold of. Nonetheless, we do see globalization was supposed to be a one-way road. There is now decoupling of some kind. It shouldn't be overstated, but we seem to be more in, like, an Orwellian world of big super blocks, rather than, sort of, the one block eventually swallowing every other one. And again, U.S. power seems to be more limited now than it was in the past. So, even if it's impossible to grab these levers or make any political reform, nonetheless, one could see what is happening now as a reflection of the ebbing of U.S. power, globalization, American empire, everywhere.
[00:22:23] Daniel Bessner: So, I think we live in a strange moment because, again, objectively, you are correct. There is no doubt. You just look at the share of global GDP held by the G7. Like, even the decline in GDP has actually exceeded predictions that were made, like, two years ago, right? They said, forget the exact numbers, but they said it would go down to X percentage and it actually went lower. So, yes, objectively, you are correct.
Couple of problems. One, the basing structure and the forward posture of the United States with world ending weapons is a unique situation as well. So, you could see objective material decline in terms of economic power, but basically the objective military power remains incredibly high. The way that I put it as a little bit of a joke, you can't forget your Engels, right? Engels was the one who was writing a lot about the military. Engels was the one who was writing a lot about security. And Marx, obviously, the genius, overshadowed him. But there's also, like, a fundamental, sort of, who owns the means of violence that might, even in some genuine sense, precede who owns the means of production. Probably does.
What's strange about the moment is that it doesn't seem like those means are going to be used in every situation. For example, I am doubtful the United States will use world ending weapons over Taiwan, right? So, on one hand, everyone could see where this is going. China is eventually not going to dominate Taiwan. Maybe some arrangement could be reached. It is going to be regionally hegemonic in East Asia in 50 years. I don't think there is a world of decisions that gets you to the United States being regionally hegemonic in 2075 in East Asia.
So, there are some inevitabilities. So, the question is what happens in those 50 years or so? What do you use to make a security transition or not? Because the United States does have the world ending weapons. So, it seems like it could remain regionally hegemonic in East Asia. And if you ask a random D.C. blob guy, they're going to say, “Don't worry, we've got it under control. The United States is going to remain dominant in East Asia.”
[00:24:17] Peter Slezkine: Well, I think random D.C. blob guy is going to say that China is an extraordinary existential threat, that if Taiwan goes, then they're going to break out of the first island chain and get up to no good everywhere, and then, before you know it, we're all going to be under Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule.
[00:24:33] Daniel Bessner: Yeah, which is nonsense.
[00:24:36] Peter Slezkine: I'm just saying that it's necessary for the blob guy to push this line.
[00:24:41] Daniel Bessner: Sure, but that is not going to hold, right? At some point, reality intrudes. But, yeah, I mean, certainly, that person will say that in order to justify their entire way of being in the world.
[00:24:53] Peter Slezkine: But you don't think that we're already at a stage where reality is intruding. Because it does seem that, among the blob, there are more and more people who say that certain kinds of wars, certain American intervention, isn't worth it. The democracy promotion is maybe a project that has seen better days.
[00:25:12] Daniel Bessner: So, I think there's some agreement, like the Middle East is not going to matter as much. Eastern Europe doesn't really matter that much. So, you're going to have this relative decline in U.S. global hegemony, but taken along with the reshifting of position to East Asia. And so, that is what I think is going to happen in the next 10-ish years, which, to me, is missing the forest from the trees, which is that you're not going to be able to be involved in East Asia, either. That the United States being able to dominate like it does was extraordinarily historically unique. And it's not going to be able to basically just do that into the future.
[00:25:48] Peter Slezkine: So, from the perspective of the American empires and ideological project, what is the role of the adversary of Russia and China, in particular? So, how do these beasts look from here? I mean, they are obviously big real entities in the international system, but they are also imaginary constructs in Washington. So, what are these monsters I've seen from D.C. and how are they different, one from the other?
[00:26:12] Daniel Bessner: Well, you could just very clearly imagine what the average blob guy would say. I mean, Russia is trying to overtake Ukraine, and it is a threat to global democracy. And if it takes over Kiev, then it'll roll right into Poland, so, making it an existential threat. And that's interesting, though. I think that's framed mostly in great power politics, not ideological. And then with China, you get the old Cold War playbook, which is that, not only is it militarily powerful, but they want to create an alternative world system. That is what the blob guy would say. From my perspective, neither of those countries threaten any genuine American interests. And the big thing to do, particularly, vis-a-vis China, is to come to genuine climate change agreements that are going to have to involve deconsumption, that we're going to have to rethink the consumer centered citizen of the 20th century in a serious way. That's what I would want to talk about with China and India and all of the world's powers from Europe and beyond, to focus on this idea of consumption, because I think that's a primary cause of climate change, consumption from air travel to the little plastic shit we all use every day. The problem is I think that's impossible under capitalism. So, we're in a dilly of a pickle, Peter.
[00:27:26] Peter Slezkine: Yeah, I was about to say how unearthed in this competitive system you're going to get people to come together to talk about.
[00:27:32] Daniel Bessner: No, it's not going to happen. We're going to get mutual ruin. That's what we're going to get.
[00:27:37] Peter Slezkine: But mutual ruin, fast or slow? I mean, is Ukraine or Taiwan going to result in nuclear Armageddon, or are we just going to drown in our plastic shit?
[00:27:44] Daniel Bessner: Depends on your framework. I don't know. I mean, like, there's always contingencies. I can't predict what'll happen. I don't think it'll be good. I haven't seen any evidence in my entire political adulthood of any great powers, i.e., the countries that could actually affect things, moving in a way that took climate change seriously. I don't see any power block to emerge to do that because taking climate change seriously will necessarily entail, not even anti-capitalist, but capitalist projects. So, that seems like that's not going to happen. So, we're in a mutual ruin. It sucks. And then the bourgeois subject's hope in the metropole is that they'll be able to skate by, right? Like, that's basically the dream of all the 21st century bourgeoisie. That they're so well positioned that they'll be able to skate by in some serious regard.
[00:28:36] Peter Slezkine: Well, they have, so far.
[00:28:38] Daniel Bessner: They have, so far —true. True. It feels like I'm an aristocrat in 1785. The system's been declining for a while, but we've been okay, you know. Maybe we don't have as much money, but they pay us a little bit. I don't know. I mean, that's a prediction. I just couldn't know.
[00:28:54] Peter Slezkine: Well, but the peasants and the proles don't have pitchforks anymore, according to you.
[00:28:58] Daniel Bessner: Yeah, the peasants and the proles have cheap calories and free porn. I mean, that's the problem, right? Like, maybe the Green Revolution's greatest long term effect was to make revolution impossible by ending food scarcity, which has always… or not, I mean, I couldn't say categorically always, but many times in history preceded genuine political change. I mean, this is a gigantic thing that has been solved by the ruling class.
[00:28:23] Peter Slezkine: Well, but so, to avoid an entirely depressing conclusion.
[00:29:27] Daniel Bessner: Why is it depressing? It’s just what it is.
[00:29:30] Peter Slezkine: I don't know. If it's not depressing to you, then you're a very strange man. You seem to want one thing, expect another, and be satisfied with that dissonance.
[00:29:37] Daniel Bessner: Well, that's just life, baby. I hate to tell you how it all ends, but it's not good. Do you think I'm wrong?
[00:29:44] Peter Slezkine: Yeah.
[00:29:45] Daniel Bessner: So, tell me where there's hope.
[00:29:46] Peter Slezkine: Well, I don't define the problem exactly as you do. I think climate change and plastic pile-ups need to be addressed on one plane, but the issue of American empire, if that's what we agree to call it, and war on its borders is a more immediate issue that can probably be resolved, that a great portion of that American empire is dissatisfied with the way it functions at the moment, that it is encountering serious external constraints.
[00:30:19] Daniel Bessner: But where's the avenue for political change?
[00:30:21] Peter Slezkine: So, the rhetorical adjustments are already happening. And as you know, I have a chapter in your edited volume coming out that claims that the entire post war American project was driven by the effort to lead the free world. So, there is this conceptual underpinning that then creates a certain…
[00:30:40] Daniel Bessner: So, this is what I would say in response to that. And your essay actually helped me think this through. The American century had three pegs, I think — military/political, economic, and cultural. And the cultural was part of an ideological project where people genuinely believed in the American project. I think we're living in a moment where two of those legs continue to exist and the cultural ideological one has gone away. That was, I think, what Fukuyama almost meant by the end of history. But the issue is the other two prongs of the system remain, and remain quite powerful, even if they are objectively diminishing.
So, that is why I would say that what the last few years have demonstrated is that you could lose that leg of the American Century project, and it doesn't actually matter because power has been so insulated very specifically in this country, in particular, that I do not see any genuine paths to changing it.
That's why you would see something like the American Empire, kind of, just run on fumes, because no country wants to disentangle those sorts of entanglements, because their domestic legitimacy is based on forms of consumption that rest upon those entanglements.
So, then the question is, how is climate disruption going to inform the continuation of those economic entanglements? Because I buy the redefinition of the bourgeois subject as a consumer. And so, legitimacy is linked to the maintenance of these supply lines. And that's true here, and it's true in China, and it's even true a little bit in Russia. You know better than me how the Soviet Union is remembered in various regards, right? There's some positive elements, and then the lack of food is a negative element.
And well, and the other thing is now we're basically talking about state economies. Then, you have, like, the international class of financiers that are themselves difficult to control, because they're not subject to any democratic accountability, as was the goal initially. So, yeah, for all these reasons, I think we're going to have to change a lot of things to put things on the right path.
[00:32:41] Peter Slezkine: Thanks for listening to the Monterey Trialogue Podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the show, so you don’t miss out on any episodes. I’m Peter Slezkine.
The Monterey Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and produced by University FM.