Episode 218: The Siren Song of Rallying Around a ‘Common Enemy’ to Promote Progressive Causes
Citations Needed | April 16, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
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Nima: “Senate Weighs Investing $120 Billion in Science to Counter China,” trumpeted the New York Times in 2021. “A New Economic Patriotism Can Help Unite Our Divided Congress,” argued Newsweek in 2023. “US cedes ground to China with ‘self-inflicted wound’ of USAid shutdown, analysts say,” cautioned the Guardian in 2025.
Adam: In recent years, we’ve been exposed to the latest version of a centuries old geopolitical message. We all have a common enemy, and we all need to unite to fight it by making our own country stronger. That enemy, most commonly these days China, is threatening to outpace, if it isn’t already outpacing, the US in infrastructure investment, education, technological development and elsewhere, and we need to devote millions, billions, even trillions of dollars to restoring the vitality of our institutions in order to reverse this sinister trend.
Nima: But why must defeating an enemy be the justification for policy that has the potential to benefit the public? Why should we just accept the premise that there must be an adversary to compete against and defeat? Can’t policy for the public good be enacted for the sole purpose of improving people’s lives? And how does this messaging about the threat of a looming adversary serve the ruling class?
Adam: On today’s episode, we’ll detail the timeworn trope of the common enemy as a unifying device, looking at how increasingly so called progressives are appealing to feel good sentiments of unity and to the genuine need for sound infrastructure, robust social safety nets, corporate regulation, and functional institutions in order to sell the idea that there is and always will be, a shadowy bad guy that must be overcome.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by Greg Grandin, the C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University and the author of many award-winning books, including Empire’s Workshop, Fordlandia, The Empire of Necessity, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The End of the Myth. His new book, America, América: A New History of the New World, will be published this month, April 2025, by Penguin. Tell your local bookstore to pre-order it today.
[Begin clip]
Greg Grandin: The fact of the matter is, the structure of the United States is national-security liberalism, and has been since the Cold War, the military Keynesianism, spending massive amounts of money based on the premise that you can have guns and butter, and that easily leads to the idea that you pitch the butter by talking about the guns. You know, the United States has had a wartime economy coming out of World War II and then keeping it. And then there was the premise, and for a while that premise did hold that you could have both. Vietnam was really the end of it, and it led to the political polarization and collapse of the general Cold War consensus that governed the nation for decades after World War II and led more to exactly this, a more overt pitching progressive politics in terms of national security.
[End clip]
Adam: This is a spiritual sequel to Episode 117: The ‘Always Lagging’ US War Machine, where we detailed how there is a confederation of think tanks and pundits who are constantly talking about how the US is always lagging behind some foreign enemy, that despite the fact that the US has by far the world’s largest military budget, more than the top 10 next countries combined, it is somehow always behind and it needs more money at all times. It’s not behind enough to where they’re not doing their jobs well, but it’s a sweet spot where they’re always behind enough to need more money.
Nima: Russia has too many icebreakers in the Arctic, Adam.
Adam: Yeah. Well, whatever it is, they can sort of find something we’re supposedly lagging behind on. And never mind that Russia has 14 times the Arctic coast the US does. And so this is a sequel to that, which is the kind of progressive version of that, which is, we live in a garrison state, a military state, to a large degree. It’s obviously, in many ways, institutionally a very conservative country in terms of how the Senate is formulated, how media works, and to get across or to promote a progressive policy, we have to frame it as necessary to defeat some enemy, namely China.
What we argue is that this increasingly popular rhetorical device is not just rhetorical. In many ways, it is itself boosting these bloated military budgets, but also reinforces a premise that we somehow need to defeat or vanquish China or Russia or other enemies, rather than living in a world where we can coexist, and that there’s some sort of great competition, some Cold War 2.0 with China, that we sort of always are on the cusp of winning. Oftentimes, this is kind of latched on to this authoritarian vs. democracy, fifth-grade understanding of politics that’s very popular in a lot of liberal circles. And so we’re going to talk about that, and why, aside from being very ahistorical and self-serving, it can be dangerous. It can be pernicious. It can promote militarism. It can promote mutual exclusivity. And chief among the problems we’ll discuss is that it basically makes cooperation over things like the existential threat of climate change that much more difficult, if not impossible.
Nima: The use of a common enemy as a unifying force or framework has ancient roots, from the poet Homer and playwright Aeschylus in ancient Greece to orators like Demosthenes or statesmen like Themistocles, from the Trojan War through the Persian Wars, through the Peloponnesian Wars, calls for Greek unity were meant to bring together disparate city states to fight against a common enemy, oftentimes using the tropes of defending freedom or saying that Greek civilization was superior to whatever threat was looming, using those to kind of galvanize different factions into one unifying force.
During the third and second centuries BC, Rome and Carthage battled over control of the Mediterranean, particularly in what are known as the Punic Wars. Roman officials stressed the need to defeat Carthage and senator Cato the Elder famously ended many of his speeches by insisting that Carthage be, quote-unquote, “destroyed.” Now this was even when his speeches were not related to Carthage, kind of the ancient version of “God bless the troops.”
In his historical analysis of Rome published in the 1530s called Discourses on Livy, Italian author and philosopher Nicolo Machiavelli would write, quote, “Discord in a republic is usually due to idleness and peace and unity to fear and war.” End quote.
Adam: Now cut to the 17th century, about a century and a half after the Discourses on Livy, in the early 1670s, the German scientist and diplomat Gottfried Leibniz would produce another example of this. Leibniz composed a series of documents known as the Egypt Plan, in which he sought to persuade Louis XIV to invade Egypt. Leibniz argued that the invasion would confer political and economic benefits, namely, giving France greater control over trade. But Leibniz also made a religious appeal, claiming that the invasion would prevent European infighting. See, Leibniz was part of an intellectual movement that emerged after the Thirty Years’ War, which was from 1618 to 1648, and he thought that the way to heal the wounds of European sectarianism was to have Protestants and Catholics unite to do what? To go conquer and kill some Muslims, right? Because you need a common enemy to create unity within your country. And to him, it was also pursuing progressive means. Leibniz is very often credited with basically inventing the concept of a European liberal welfare state. But that needed a common enemy to unify the Protestants and Catholics, at least in his imagination, and it would expedite the fall of the Ottoman Empire and allow the French and Christian Europe supremacy in the Middle East and the re-conquest of the so called Holy Land.
Nima: As historian Lloyd Strickland writes, quote,
Leibniz [describes] Egypt as “a refuge of Mohammedan perfidy”, and states that one of the benefits of the plan is that it would lead to “the downfall of the Turkish Empire”.
End quote. Strickland then quotes Leibniz directly. Quote,
“There is a great proneness to revolt, not just in Egypt but in the East as a whole, and this would increase were there to appear some foreign force upon which the insurgents could rely. Thus the day of reckoning is approaching for the Turkish Empire, because it is certain that its ruin would follow the occupation of Egypt.”
With its promise to lay waste to the Turkish Empire, Leibniz claims that his plan “is in the interests of the whole human race and the Christian religion”. The religious benefit Leibniz has in mind here — that his plan will spell the doom of the Turks, and for that reason should be undertaken in the interests of Christianity — was one that was often identified in Christian calls for holy war with Muslims both inside and outside the crusader tradition.
Strickland continues. Quote,
[Leibniz] explains, for example, that the Christians in Albania — although belonging to a different branch of Christianity — would follow the French in rising up against the Turks. The picture Leibniz paints, then, is of a potential Christian army spread across mainland Europe, Africa and Asia that just needed the catalyst of a French invasion of Egypt to band together and fight as one.
End quote.
Adam: Right, and that’s how you unify, Nima. You unify through having a common enemy. Now cut to the Cold War, where this, of course, was a central element of, I guess you could say liberal militarism, or kind of the post-World War II consensus that we now speak fawningly of, I think, not unjustifiably, in some contexts, given where we’re at right now. But this was a chief animator of bloated militarism, military budgets and adventurism in places like Vietnam, Africa, Cuba, Central America.
Starting in the mid-1940s, Harry Truman pitched a federal health-insurance program in which every US worker would pay monthly fees or taxes to cover the cost of all medical expenses in a time of illness, as we discussed in Episode 134, the American Medical Association opposed this plan and dismissed it as a pinko or leftwing plot, calling it, quote, “socialized medicine,” though it, of course, was far from that. It was modeled largely on the NHS in Great Britain. Truman responded with this, quote,
The American people are the most insurance-minded people in the world. They will not be frightened off from health insurance because some people have misnamed it ‘socialized medicine.’ I repeat — what I am recommending is not socialized medicine. Socialized medicine means that all doctors work as employees of government. The American people want no such system. No such system is here proposed.
Unquote. Indeed, Truman claims that the system he proposed would be essential to defeating the Soviet Union. As columnist Drew Pearson wrote in April of 1949, quote,
A physically fit nation not only is essential to economic prosperity, but is our first line of military defense, President Truman told a group of medical, labor and civic leaders who called the discussion the administration’s pay-as-you-go health-insurance program.
We cannot afford to be handicapped, as in the last war, when “30 to 40% of our draftees were rejected on medical grounds,” Truman [said.]
Pearson went on to write,
It is a basic responsibility of government, he added, to provide our children with the medical care needs to make healthy citizens.
Unquote. Truman’s rhetoric and vision of a healthy military, of course, went nowhere. The opposition from Republican lawmakers, industry, and the AMA was much too strong, as was the parallel propaganda campaign cooked up on Madison Avenue that painted it as a communist plot.
Nima: But he was framing it as literally an anti-communist policy.
Adam: Which, again, to some extent, you can sympathize with that, and we’ll discuss that in this episode. You kind of understand why it’s being framed that way, but ultimately it’s just a dead end because people are not really motivated by these abstractions. They’re motivated by, Well, wait, I get my healthcare paid for? And I don’t have to worry about it, just like they do in the NHS in England? And so we argue it both promotes mutual exclusivity and military logic, but also doesn’t really resonate with people. It’s sort of one of these Beltway things that sounds really good to people who write for the Washington Post and are in, you know, sort of in the pundit class, but it has a history of not really resonating with the public. It has a history of being seen as a little too abstract or a little too cute by half.
Nima: And to then do other things that are largely negative, such as, you know, militarizing a response to climate change or climate chaos and inevitable migration and movement of people from areas that are threatened by climate change, largely due to Global North pollution and carbon outputs. But then those potential solutions are seen as more Fortress America, garrison state policies, rather than saying, Well, you know, we can use the full force of the military and the excessive military budgets to help people, to open up borders to have people reach safety and security. Of course, that is never what the militarizing or the unifying, galvanizing force of uniting against the common enemy of climate change. It winds up being the enemy of people who are migrating.
Adam: Yeah, I mean, as we discussed in Episode 122: Climate Chaos (Part II) — The Militarization of Liberals’ Climate Change Response, that there’s a huge risk that has really played out during the Biden administration, which is that when you frame climate change as a competition, war against China, not only are you, and to Biden’s credit, they did re-enter the Paris Accords. So it’s not like they did not have any cooperation at all, but in terms of funding and funding priorities, there was this really clever progressive-left line about how the military is taking climate change seriously, but if we actually look at what was funded, it was just more ecologically friendly drones and tanks, and most of the money went to shoring up the infrastructure and protections of military bases from climate catastrophe, and in many ways, this contributed to the further militarization of the border in terms of climate refugees. So that’s not about mitigating or reducing carbon emissions or preventing the worst-case scenarios of climate chaos. That’s a Fort Apache mentality that’s kind of protecting our own. Both conversations are technically about doing something about climate change, but those have two different meanings.
Nima: The Army News Service, the news service of the US Army, on February 10, 2022, published an article, quote, “Army introduces strategy to combat climate change threats,” end quote, So the military is also aware of using this kind of framework to bolster its own power, to get more funding for, you know, always having a military solution to a global, existential human crisis, which then, of course, just means, as you said, Adam, more drones, more walls, more caging of people who are trying to move.
Adam: I mean, because what does it mean for the military to have a role in fighting climate change?
Nima: Especially when they’re one of the biggest emitters.
Adam: Well, yeah, and maybe in some abstract sense, they can reduce some emissions, but they’re growing at the same time, so that doesn’t really matter, and it’s a trivial difference, and it’s all just about, again, getting more defense contracts and loading your budget. But what do you do? Shoot at the sun? Are you going to shoot at carbon molecules? This is about policy of how you extract fossil fuels from the Earth, which has very little to do with militarism. If you militarize things, no matter what it is, whether it’s investing in healthcare, child cancer research, climate change, if you put a kind of slick military spin on it, the media loves it. Media reports this as, Oh, look how cool this is, right? And Beltway pundits eat it up, because, again, it’s the easiest way to, kind of get something through the media and public and lawmaking sausage machine. It’s sort of, Oh, you this is about national security. Well, you know, right this way, sir. You can cut right through the line. Rather than like, kids not eating is objectively bad. Kids dying of cancer is objectively bad. People not having healthcare and having to go into debt to pay for a surgery–
Nima: It doesn’t move people. It doesn’t motivate. It doesn’t inspire. Yeah.
Adam: Well, it can’t be easily jammed into an existing ecosystem of funding, right? That’s the issue. This is why, again, I want to be clear, why we are criticizing this method. We think it’s bad, we’re very understanding about why people do it. Like, I get it. It’s obvious why it’s becoming more and more popular as the military budget bloats more and more and more. But what we argue is that it is a siren song. It is a false allure, as we saw during the Biden years.
So this narrative would really take off during the Biden years to pretty much, he was kind of the king of this framing. Every single thing that was progressive or even kind of budgetary, or even maybe slightly redistributive in terms of creating more government jobs or more jobs downstream from government spending, always had to be framed as antipathy towards China. A big proponent of this was Biden ally, and I guess, self-described progressive, we can dispute whether that term is correct, given his eccentric views on Elon Musk and other things, but Ro Khanna, representative of California. He was an initial sponsor of a major bipartisan bill called the Endless Frontier Act, which is great. I’m sure our guest, Greg Grandin, will appreciate that.
Introduced in 2020, the legislation authorized $110 billion in infrastructure funding for various scientific and technological pursuits, including chip manufacturing, space exploration, educational programs and, quote, “wireless supply chain innovation,” unquote. Alongside these investments, though the act also aimed to weaken achievements in China, proposed sanctions and the prohibition of federal funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Again, even setting aside climate change, cooperation with respect to major disease outbreaks and pandemics is also a huge thing that the US and China need to work on that they kind of don’t really do much anymore because of this type of rhetoric. Namely, though that would say that’s more from the Trump wing. The act received ringing endorsements by major media, including the Washington Post and New York Times, Bloomberg’s Noah Smith. It was later incorporated into the CHIPS and Science Act, which was signed into law in 2022.
To make this message especially clear, Khanna repeatedly appeared on Fox News to present ostensibly progressive policy as a necessary condition to defeat China. The message is perfectly compatible with Fox News and its audience, because it doesn’t promote policies that could conceivably benefit the public simply for the sake of benefiting the public, but for the sake of defeating a perceived enemy. In October of 2021, for example, Khanna appeared on Fox News show Special Report alongside South Carolina Congressmember Nancy Mace, who’s now just this weird anti-trans troll in Congress. So we’re going to listen to this clip, this response by Representative Khanna, sitting next to Nancy Mace in response to Fox News host Bret Baier, basically sorting the premise that China is beating the US at technology and that this was existentially dangerous to, I guess, national security and our national ego.
[Begin clip]
Bret Baier: There was a federal worker who recently left, and he had some things to say about the security from China and Russia. This man is Nic Chaillan, and he told the Financial Times, and I’ll put it up on the screen here, about what we are facing. And he said to them, quote, “We have no competing, fighting chance against China 15 to 20 years. Right now, it’s already a done deal. It’s already over in my opinion. Good reason to be angry.” Saying that artificial intelligence, other successes that China has, will put them ahead. As we’re dealing with this, we’re having a hard time getting through Congress. Is he right?
Ro Khanna: No, he’s not. I represent Silicon Valley. Invite him to come to my district. American technology still leads. The Chinese can’t compete. But we shouldn’t be complacent. Look, we have a huge advantage when it comes to our Air Force, our Navy, our military. China is desperate. They’re saying, Where is our weakness? They’re trying with artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, and that’s why we need to be one step ahead and mobilize. And that’s what Representative Mace and my bill will ensure. But we still are much more innovative than the Chinese.
[End clip]
Adam: Now, this type of positioning of infrastructure investment as anti-China did not go unnoticed by some progressives. There was a Politico article from May of 2021, with the headline, “Progressives warn Biden, Congress against fueling hatred with anti-China measures:
Anti-war lawmakers and activists say depicting China as an existential threat fuels hatred at home while doing little to contain Beijing’s ambitions.” I guess there’s a Beijing’s ambitions vs. the US not having those. And then it quoted, you know, activist groups saying that this could have a parallel with Islamophobia and the War on Terror in terms of fueling hatred of Asians domestically. Tobita Chow, who’s a director of progressive advocacy at Justice Is Global, at the time, said, quote,
We can see this throughout U.S. history, most recently with Islamophobia and the war on terror, where we could have leaders of both parties be very carefully anti-racist and say “Islam is not our enemy,” but that didn’t stop widespread Islamophobia and acts of violence.
Unquote. You know, the argument being is that if we talk about China, especially in the wake of Covid, as this kind of boogie-woogie, sinister thing, where everything they do is inherently sinister and they’re an existential threat to the US, vs. just another superpower, that obviously there’s going to be points of tension by definition, but they’re not existentially a threat or existentially evile, that this type of rhetoric could backfire. So those progressives, of course, were not really listened to, but it is a thread that people have been pushing back with liberal discourse for a while. And of course, Trump triples down on this kind of rhetoric and makes it that much worse. So it becomes this kind of bipartisan way you fuel the national security state, because, again, you don’t lose anything by doing it. You have nothing to gain by not doing the Well, here’s this thing I want, whether it’s a fucking stop sign in my neighborhood or zoning reform or whatever, you know, if you can orient it in some sort of great battle of civilizations, then it makes it sexy and urgent.
Nima: Yeah, and we’ve seen, actually, the rhetoric-to-real-life pipeline here, with rising violence against Asian and AAPI people in the country, largely as a direct result of this kind of rhetoric, from the pandemic to just constant competition talking points. And as you said, Adam, this is not just a conservative or rightwing or MAGA talking point. In late 2021, Democratic Missouri Senate candidate Lucas Kunce was doing this himself. Kunce, a former Marine who ran as a sort of, quote, “patriotic populist,” end quote, lost his election, but it’s worth looking back at his campaign rhetoric as yet another example of the China hawkishness cloaked in superficial progressivism. So here’s a clip of one of Lucas Kunce campaign ads in which he attacks Missouri Republican politicians for, quote-unquote, “selling out” to China.
[Begin clip]
Lucas Kunce: Our politicians swore to protect us, just like I did as a US Marine. But while I deployed, they stripped Missouri for parts. They sold our land to China. They bowed down to Chinese state TV, and they took money from Chinese corporations. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we called that aiding the enemy. I’m running for US Senate because Missourians deserve a warrior who will fight for them, and I’m ready to serve.
I’m Lucas Kunce, and I approve this message.
[End clip]
Nima: Yeah, that’s the Democratic candidate. Just as a reminder.
Adam: No, man, they’re gonna outflank them from the right, man. No one’s ever thought of this before. That’s why John Kerry was the president in 2004. Now, Kunce’s claim about selling land to China is very flimsy. Smithfield Foods, a US-based subsidiary of a Chinese-based multinational corporation, purchased Missouri farmland in 2013 when the state increased its cap on foreign corporate purchases from zero to 1%. But according to a 2019 USDA report, China based corporations were not even in the top four non-US owners of Missouri farmland, with Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, and Italy owning more than China.
Nima: But those are not nearly as spooky, Adam. Those are white people.
Adam: Germany should be. I mean, they’re pretty sinister.
Nima: What have they ever done?
Adam: And Kunce’s next claim about bowing down to Chinese state TV. This is Kunce, referring to Eric Greitens, the Republican former Missouri governor who visited China in 2017. The video shows Greitens appearing on Beijing-based network CGTN, which is apparently ‘bowing down’ in these Chinese state media. I mean, the whole thing is absurd. I mean, again, this stuff creates an environment where even going to other states and talking to other states and appearing on their media is seen as betrayal, treason, selling out to another foreign entity, you know. And again, it’s like everybody wants to be clever and try to orient this into this kind of faux-populist politics. But faux-populist red-baiting is still just red-baiting. It’s still just acting as if talking to the quote-unquote “enemy” is somehow, per se, a sin, and this is, for obvious reasons, very illiberal, very ill-left, very dangerous, and is not conducive to cooperation with other countries.
Because, again, it’s this idea that the author of your suffering is not the ruling class or billionaires or corporations, but is this specific country wrapped in this kind of anti-establishment or anti-elite rhetoric. Again, I understand the appeal, because, you know, rich people in the United States will just watch this ad and kind of nod along, going, Yeah, those goddamn Chinese. They are stealing our land. But it’s both inaccurate and pretty ineffective, but also, just again, continues to fuel this idea that even talking to China or talking on Chinese media is somehow sinful. It taints you and makes you corrupt. Which is insane. I mean, that’s just not a liberal or progressive way of viewing foreign policy that really ought not be.
Nima: And this kind of rhetoric does not stay just in the purview of Missouri Senate candidates. The Biden administration, as well, has sold many of its own ostensibly progressive policy proposals as a means to, quote, “win the 21st century,” end quote, a jingoistic framing in itself that’s gone almost entirely unchallenged in the mainline media, the idea of winning the century. That means someone’s losing it. Vox, for example, reported in April 2021 that, quote, “Biden is using his economic plan to challenge China,” end quote. At the time, Biden was unveiling a $2 trillion infrastructure proposal as part of the Build Back Better bill, including promises like rebuilding roads, bridges and rail systems, revitalizing manufacturing jobs, modernizing power grids and installing more high-speed broadband across the country, while hyping the plan, which included all of those very good and important things, Biden would regularly invoke antipathy toward China, making statements like, quote, “China and the rest of the world is racing ahead of us in the investments they have in the future, attempting to own the future,” end quote.
Again, we’re falling behind, not just China and other countries, because we are not investing enough in the future. We’re losing the future race, guys. Vox simply accepted Biden’s premise and attacks on China as a necessary quote-unquote “strategy” and a touchstone of his presidency. Vox writers Alex Ward and Ella Nilsen wrote this, quote,
The idea is that making America more economically competitive by improving domestic infrastructure and investing in new and emerging technologies, especially clean energy technology, is the best way the US can challenge China for supremacy on the world stage — even more so than through military might or by trying to win the “war of ideas” against China’s authoritarianism.
End quote.
Adam: Keep in mind that the US funding and arming the liquidation of children in Gaza for 17 months is not authoritarian. Just to be clear about that, it’s not authoritarian.
Nima: We should clarify, of course, that is not, yeah, that’s also part of winning the future. So Vox, in this 2021 piece, reserved a few paragraphs for acknowledging racism and violence toward Asian American people, but quickly moved on to justify this Cold War premise of Biden’s infrastructure bill, emphasizing the quote, “critical importance of competing against China,” end quote. And the New York Times in its own embrace of Biden’s framing, saw fit to close an article on the same subject with a quote from a senior fellow from the conservative and always very capitalist forward Peterson Institute for International Economics, which read as follows. Quote, “The key to competition with China is not more tariffs and that kind of thing. It’s improving the competitiveness of the American workforce, of American businesses.” End quote.
Again, it’s simply accepted in these pieces that to the extent there would have been any improvements for workers or families or people living in the United States, those improvements would not be done for their own sake, but rather for the sake of beating China, right? That’s why we’re doing that. The premise of competition is not questioned in these media pieces. The only thing in question is how we can best beat China. Also, just a quick note, the Peterson Institute for International Economics should not be confused with the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which we’ve done an episode on. Yet it is heavily funded by the Peterson Foundation, as well as companies such as Chevron, Amazon, BlackRock, and the like.
Adam: And if he hadn’t already made this position clear enough. California Congressman ro Khanna authored an op-ed a Newsweek in 2023 headlined, quote, “A New Economic Patriotism Can Help Unite Our Divided Congress,” unquote. See, no one’s ever thought of this, man. Khanna extolled the virtues of Democrats and Republicans, finding, quote, “common ground,” particularly through the Endless Frontier Act. He added, quote,
It’s a transformative investment in American innovation, manufacturing, and national security, with the condition that not a dollar goes to stock buybacks and CEO bonuses. And it is already working to bring back semiconductor manufacturing to the United States.
Unquote. Khanna also touted a bill he introduced with Senator Mark Rubio, now Secretary of State, that authorized the creation of the quote, “National Development Strategy,” unquote, an alleged effort to restore US manufacturing jobs in order to quote, “help our country remain a global leader,” unquote. So we are going to defeat China through jobs, because jobs themselves are not good. It seems like a classic example of, you know, if you just invest in a reasonable, functioning state and build roads and bridges and fund education, the whole global. dominance thing will probably take care of itself. You don’t really need to obsess over it and constantly be neurotic about losing your empire status. But I guess, again, that doesn’t maybe gain much traction in DC.
Nima: Now, this kind of rhetoric, of course, has continued since the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024. Consider, for instance, Chris Murphy, the senator from Connecticut and perennial Democratic hawk. On January 27, 2025 after Trump ordered a freeze on almost all soft power foreign aid, including USAID, Murphy echoed the rhetoric of candidate Lucas Kunce, who we heard from earlier, claiming that Trump was selling out to China. Murphy posted an incoherent screed on Twitter, ending with this, quote,
The point of all of this is to destroy U.S. power in the world. That primarily helps China, who is INCREASING its aid programs as we disappear.
China — the place where all of Trump’s billionaires make their products and wants deals to open markets.
Think there’s a connection?
End quote.
Adam: I love the Rachel Maddow, Glenn Beck, ‘Coincidence? You decide.’ Now, of course, the point is not to destroy US power. Trump doesn’t want to do that. Certainly, the epublican Party doesn’t want to do that. They want to redirect the US;s soft power, towards more funding of hard power, specifically transferring funds from liberal imperial programs at USAID to the State Department and CIA. The implication of Murphy’s statement is that Trump is somehow colluding with China to increase Chinese aid internationally? It’s unclear. I guess that Trump is somehow trying to sabotage the US so China can take over. I guess there’s also a Chinagate as well. He’s also on their tail. Nobody really knows. Again, we can defend the US government funding AIDS medication, which is something that USAID does that’s good. It’s a sort of good soft power vs. their more sinister soft power, like trying to overthrow governments. Although I suppose they could use AIDS funding to do that too, but to my knowledge, they haven’t. But you can’t make the argument as such that that’s good, because I guess again, in Washington, that doesn’t really get you anywhere. So it has to be part of a conspiracy for China to overtake the US. Unclear how those things are related.
Now, Murphy’s conspiratorial innuendo quickly found a home in leading media. Some examples include the Guardian in February of 2025 wrote a story called, quote, “US cedes ground to China with ‘self-inflicted wound’ of USAid shutdown, analysts say.” The Miami Herald would run an opinion piece the day after, quote, “Trump’s foreign aid cuts are a boon for dictators in China, Venezuela and Cuba,” unquote. Foreign Policy four days later would write, quote, “Foreign Autocrats Are Exploiting Trump’s Chaos,” unquote. The idea is that Trump gutting USAID, you know, largely as a kind of revenge tour against what he viewed as them helping promote the Russia connections, but in many ways, as we noted, he’s redirecting the money into the CIA and Marco Rubio’s State Department to carry out clandestine activities that way. So it’s not as if the overall meddling is going to go down.
Nima: [Laughs] He’s not anti-meddling. This idea that Trump and MAGA is isolationist is so absurd.
Adam: But again, that’s like, how you get people to care, I guess, is the idea, right? You can’t say people in poor countries in the Global South are going to die without us funding their AIDS medication, because that, I guess, doesn’t get anywhere. So you have to build this kind of grand Cold War narrative where, if we don’t fund AIDS medication, the sinister Chinese will do it sinisterly, evilly, I guess, unlike us who do it for purely benevolent reasons.
Nima: And then on our big, you know, Risk game board, we’ll have AIDS patients in the pocket of big China.
Adam: Yeah, that’s the argument, I guess. That’s somehow supposed to be bad is if I care who gives them their AIDS medication. And this is where it all gets rather goofy, because, again, if the only way anything gets traction, or what US senators like to do is frame everything in national security terms, in this kind of mutual exclusivity with respect to China, where anything that’s bad here that happens, or anything that undermines the infrastructure or education is somehow helping or fueling or giving a win to China, it becomes a form of brain worms. It sort of consumes your worldview, and it reinforces this idea that there’s no cooperation, that we’re inherently existentially enemies, that there’s some inevitable clash of civilizations that’s going to happen in the next, you know, few decades, a war with China’s inevitable. And I don’t see how this helps incubate or helps create the conditions for progressive policy or anti-war activism, or just, God forbid, living with the existence of other countries in a way that doesn’t view everything that’s good that happens to them as something bad that happens to us, and vice versa. So I think this is tempting. I get it. I get the appeal. I get why it’s the easy, cheap way to do things, but in the long term, it has deleterious effects, and it has deleterious effects we’ve already seen over the last decade or so.
Nima: To discuss this more, we’re now going to be joined by Greg Grandin, C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, and the author of many award-winning books, including Empire’s Workshop, Fordlandia, The Empire of Necessity, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The End of the Myth. His latest book, which will be published this month, April 2025, by Penguin, is America, América: A New History of the New World. Greg will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
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Nima: We are joined now by Greg Grandin. Greg, thank you so much for joining us again on Citations Needed.
Greg Grandin: Thanks for having me back.
Adam: Yeah. So it seemed like when discussing the temptation of framing progressive policy as part of some national security, Cold War effort, you seemed like the most obvious choice to have on to talk about this. Because, again, I think it’s, it’s superficially kind of appealing, right? It’s like, everybody who does this for the first time thinks they’ve cracked the Da Vinci code. You know? They kind of do that thing where they look around, the camera zooms in, and they’re like, Whoa, what if we, what if we took a progressive policy but said it was important for national security? And you’re like, Whoa, no one’s ever thought of that. We have to fund education to get a step up on China. We have to build our industrial base, because we need to defeat China in some kind of nebulous cold war. And in theory, this can be kind of benign, but I think very quickly veers into Cold War framings that foreclose on any kind of participation, or any kind of global order that isn’t about defeating some other superpower. And it’s like the only language we can speak is the language of dominance and world dominance, and that has negative externalities, if not in intent, in effect, right? How it sort of manifests. We see this with Lucas Kunce, Ro Khanna, Chris Murphy, and, of course, the Biden White House. They couldn’t really promote any kind of economic or foreign policy position without talking about it in these kind of mutually exclusive terms with respect to China. So I want to sort of begin by asking what you think the risks are to this approach, like, are we being overly precious, or does this make any kind of cooperation with other countries more difficult? And I think more importantly, more to the point of the episode, what does it say about the current state of liberalism that to get anything, or rather, the perception that to get anything past that’s remotely progressive, it has to be smuggled into some neoconservative foreign policy framing?
Greg Grandin: I mean, there’s the fluff of the rhetoric, and we can get to that of any particular policy that’s being sold like that, or a politician that’s being sold like that. But the fact of the matter is, the structure of the United States is national-security liberalism, and has been since the Cold War, the military Keynesianism, spending massive amounts of money based on the premise that you can have guns and butter, and that easily leads to the idea that you pitch the butter by talking about the guns. You know, the United States has had a wartime economy coming out of World War II and then keeping it. And then there was the premise. And for a while that premise did hold that you could have both. Vietnam was really the end of it, and it led to the political polarization and collapse of the general Cold War consensus that governed the nation for decades after World War II, and led more to exactly this, a more overt pitching progressive politics in terms of national security, where in the past, it was just presumed that you could have both.
But let me just say, I can go back even further. That is, I think structurally, the end of the Cold War and the advent of military Keynesianism was a qualitative leap in the structure of the United States as a society, but the United States as an expanding nation, progress and progressivism and liberalism, whatever you call it, the expansion of constitutional protections and liberal ideals to more and more people, was always hitched to expansion, one way or the other, whether it’s the expansion of suffrage to unpropertied and unleaded men that was predicated on Indian removal. I mean, you know, the suffrage and labor reformism was hitched to support for World War I. Abolition was hitched to the pacification of the West. I mean, it goes on and on and on. Civil rights to the Cold War. Even, I would say, up to Clinton, you could say the expansion of gay rights and diverse sexual identities was hitched to a certain kind of economic globalization.
So it’s a deep structural problem and a deep structural dependency, because the United States isn’t just any other nation. Costa Rica can’t go out and say, We’re going to have national healthcare, but it’s also going to make us, you know, we’re going to link it to the defense industry. I mean, you know, it’s only the United States that can do that. And we see an increasing desperation on people like Biden and others to link progress to national security, to competition. So, you know, we’re going to rebuild our industrial base because we have to compete with China. We’re going to solve climate change because the military is in favor of it, too. There was a run there where it was the military that was concerned about climate change, because it was going to be the field in which future wars were fought, and also they wanted a responsible institution. But, yeah, it’s deeply embedded in the structure of the United States to sell progress and the notion of a common good, either on the possibility of expansion or on the necessity for national security.
Nima: Yeah, it’s a great point. And actually, because you mentioned climate change, I really want to stay on this issue for a minute, Greg. Climate change being pretty much the most existential issue of our time, this is a planet that needs to be able to sustain life for human beings and so for us to continue to exist, so climate change, very, very important. And this idea of kind of smuggling in notions of cooperation, or ways that the United States and China can work together, kind of smuggling in using a national-security framework, may be kind of superficially appealing, but we don’t really see it working, because, as you said, and as kind of Adam nodded to earlier, these narratives of domination, of competition, right? We’re falling behind China. We have to constantly be innovating through our tech and modernizing our military. How do these narratives really butt up against the existential threat and the kind of refusal to confront it face on by the United States government and certainly very, very powerful institutions within the United States, when we always have this kind of, beat China, we have to beat China. We have to go green better than China. We have to be more environmentally stable, because that beats China. How does this really prevent any meaningful cooperation and progress from occurring?
Greg Grandin: Well, there’s two tracks in terms of thinking about climate change mainstream. There’s the liberal-progressive vision that climate change is a crisis that really acknowledges the fact that we’re all in this together. And this is a foundational principle of liberal internationalism, the post-Cold War order, despite all the hypocrisies and despite all of the exceptions to it and violations to it, but the foundational premise of the world order that is being dismantled now by Trump is that the first principle of the world order is cooperation, is that nations have mutual interests. And again, the violations were many, and it didn’t stop horrific wars, but it was a kind of principle that led to a certain worldview, and climate change was the terminus of that worldview, that this was the problem that affirmed that worldview, that we were in it together. There was a true universalism, that we had to confront this problem as the Federation would, if it was Star Trek, you know, we would, we would do it together, and we’d combine our technologies, and we’d overcome it. And in the process, we’d generate green jobs. We’d make the transition from coal to solar without generating any political turmoil or social unrest, and everything would be good. There was a way forward. There was a path forward.
But it turns out there’s another vision. There’s another vision that climate change actually brings forth a certain kind of race realism, to use a phrase that was associated with Trump’s first term, that the first premise of the world order isn’t, or shouldn’t be, cooperation, it should be competition, and it should be the survival of the fittest. And, you know, Trump denies climate change, but in some ways, and I don’t know, I think this might have been Naomi Klein who said this, I’m not sure, but Trump is really the first climate-change politician, because in all of his assaults on the premises and ideals of liberal internationalism is a recognition that not all will sit at the table, not all nations will rise up, not all will have a place in the new world order. There will be winners and losers. And turns out that cataclysm, that natural environmental cataclysm, works nicely within this world order. It creates the crises which reinforce that vision.
Nima: Right. This will decide who survives and who rises.
Greg Grandin: Yeah, because certainly, and this is where it segues and joins and gets sutured onto a kind of eschatological vision, an apocalyptic Christian, or anyone, you could have any kind of religious millenarianism that the apocalypse is coming and we got to batten down, we have to have a certain kind of rightwing foreign policy as rightwing survivalism. Politicians could run along either of those tracks. And for a long time, we ran along the progressive-liberal track, which, even though it talked about competition with China and keeping up with China, it still assumed a certain amount of cooperation in order to confront climate change. But now we have a president who has revitalized and re-legitimated the doctrine of conquest. I mean, he’s literally saying we’re going to conquer Greenland, and it’s unbelievable.
Adam: I want to drill down on these two paths real quick, if I could just do a quick follow-up on that. Because I think that formulation is right. What we sort of argued, I think we’ve even argued this in a previous episode, is that the cooperation rhetoric, when it does get folded into this national-security framework in terms of funding, in terms of priorities, quickly becomes this competitive framework. And we saw this when John Kerry was appointed the climate change chief in the first year of the Biden White House. And then there was this huge, liberals and some progressives were all excited, though, that military is going to take climate change seriously.
Greg Grandin: Yeah.
Adam: But then when you actually look at what they did, what they funded, it had nothing to do with curbing extraction of fossil fuels at all. It had everything to do with shoring up military bases, funding military bases to prevent, you know, rising waters.
Nima: Or rising people.
Adam: Exactly, rising people coming from the Global South. This Fort Apache approach in terms of, like, border security.
Nima: Yeah.
Adam: Really what it was, it was about mitigation and preventing the sort of negative outcomes of climate change, which it appeared to be that, with the exception of some lofty rhetoric around the margins, or, you know, this kind of IRA tax incentives for more green vehicles, they mostly kind of have just agreed that it’s going to happen, and maybe they want to mitigate the sort of more extreme models on the fringes. But more or less, what we’re doing is we’re preparing for climate catastrophe, rather than trying to in any way prevent it. And I think that’s mostly been elite consensus for 10, 20, years, and everyone else is just running through the motions. Like, progressive leftists and these think tanks are kind of providing the color, or they’re providing the window dressing, but largely like as far as elite consensus, national-security consensus, the vast majority, you can go through and look at John Kerry’s priorities. You can do this yourself. The vast majority of resources are going towards preparation rather than prevention, with the assumption that any kind of meaningful global cooperation is not going to happen.
Once you sort of fold everything into that vision, because, again, the Pentagon is going to be pragmatic. They’re not going to sit around and think about, How do we convince people to stop extracting oil? How do we have public information campaigns with Bill McKinnon? I mean, they don’t give a shit about that. Their job is to shore up US national security interests. And so this, like, kind of warm and fuzzy rhetoric around how the Pentagon is gonna take climate change seriously, and it’s like, yeah, but they’re talking about something different than what you and I are talking about.
Greg Grandin: Yeah, that sleight of hand is present in the petroleum companies and other corporations and the government. And then where it converges, you know? And again, Trump is really just stripping the mask off of a lot of the rhetoric and revealing what’s behind it, and it is the convergence with the kind of race realism and Christian apocalypse-ism.
Adam: It seemed like to me, just kind of reading leftist rhetoric in the ’70s and ’80s, during the Cold War, with the Soviet Union, there was a general consensus, you think, even among liberals, like if you read old articles in The Nation, for example, that there was such a thing as mutual antagonism that the US building up its military base, saber rattling, talking about dominating, pivoting to Asia, dominating Asia, that this kind of rhetoric would necessarily fuel the forces of reaction and militarism in other countries, whether it be Russia or China or what have you, and that there was an idea that, like, we can’t be the two kids in the backseat fighting, saying they did it first, they did it first. That this question of kind of first blood was actually a distraction, and really what you had to do was focus on pulling back the forces of militarism within your own society with a belief that that would therefore create space for more liberal forces in other societies.
In the last 10 years, especially, I think, with the rise of a lot of stuff that Russia has done, not unjustifiably, in terms of invading Ukraine and others, this is now seen as a kind of naivete, if not per se, pro-Russia or pro-China propaganda. And it seems like the rhetoric, so-called progressives embracing this kind of mutual, exclusive Cold War framing, have kind of given up on this idea that maybe it’s not a great idea that we frame things, that we’re going to dominate Asia or dominate China or dominate these other spheres of influence, that this itself spurs militarism from Russia, and itself spurs militarism from China. Again, not to take away their agency entirely, but that was kind of a, I think it was sort of a broad conceit of liberal-left rhetoric that seems to have just kind of gone away and is now being seen as unserious, or even kind of like, I said, pro-Russia propaganda or pro-China propaganda. What do you say about that? Do you think there’s something to be said for this idea of mutual antagonism?
Greg Grandin: I think there’s a lot of reasons why it went away. I’m trying to wrap my mind around the different ways in which liberals have come to embrace our kind of military, you know, aggressiveness towards Russia, and thinking about their reaction to Donald Trump, and part of it has to do with the evolution of the Democratic Party away from a class-based party, I think, towards a party that represents the upper-income liberals. And then so Trump can only be understood in terms of a simplistic authoritarianism and not as a product of policy choices over the last couple of decades, and therefore you have to link him to a foreign policy threat. And Rachel Maddow is, of course, exhibit number one in terms of becoming a liberal hawk and in favor of domestic repression to clamp down on what they imagine to be rightwing extremism. But I don’t know. I don’t know it depends on who you’re talking about, what we’re talking about. I don’t know if the Left has moved away from that vision of having to demilitarize the United States in order to, you know, as opposed to just the Democratic Party and the liberals who support it. But I think there is something to the fact that as the United States becomes more incoherent and polarized, that is certainly, I think, reflected in the world. The incoherence and polarization. I guess the question is, what’s cause and effect?
Nima: Right, well, I think kind of talking about this idea of how liberal and the liberal framework fits into US imperialism, I want to ask about what we kind of identify as a corollary argument to this idea of a common enemy, which is kind of understood through the lens of US imperialism, the notion of the necessary evil. So a common line that one hears from liberals when justifying US imperial meddling or expansion, you know you’re talking about expansion, or this has to do with expanding weapon sales, building new systems, that the United States, for all its faults, Greg, really is just the lesser of whatever evil we want to project out in the world. And this could be real threats. This could be totally manufactured. But this idea of, not only are we the lesser of the evils, but we are necessary. This is a necessary force that we have to put out in the world. We may make mistakes, but it’s better than what would be there if it were not us, and especially we see this in the framework of China and Russia. They are expanding. They are a threat to whatever order we are projecting on the world. And so therefore we have to be there. We have to stand firm. We have to be the planetary police, because otherwise the forces of darkness would cover the face of the earth.
And as we’ve discussed earlier in this episode, this rhetoric is certainly not new. Dates back to, you know, Joseph Conrad. It dates back to any kind of idea of boosterism over colonization, colonial powers in Europe, the idea of, you know, if it’s not the British taking over Africa, it’ll be the Belgians. If it’s not the Belgians, it’ll be the Arabs. If it’s not the Arabs, it’ll be the Africans themselves, right? This kind of goes on and on and on. The British Empire constantly promoted itself by saying, If it’s not us, it’ll be the French. And you don’t want the French. Talk, Greg, if you could, about this popular liberal convention of saying that, you know, sure, imperialism may not be great, but it’s the best we’ve got. Has this even shifted at all since the Cold War? Do you see this kind of never having gone away, and what, to set up some kind of prescription for a way forward, rather than just, you know, identifying all the problems, what do you see as ways that this may be shifted away from justifying imperialism endlessly? How can we maybe move past that?
Greg Grandin: Well, I think you’re right. I think it’s just like at the beginning of our conversation, this is deeply ingrained in the structure of American politics. I mean, it goes back to a certain kind of sense of idealism that the United States had about itself. After 1848 and the revolutions in Europe, the United States used the kind of revolutionary elan of that moment to justify taking a third of Mexico and freeing Mexicans from their feudal overlords. And yeah, and you mentioned Joseph Conrad, but you could also look at the some of the foundational theorists of the early Cold War who were very much aware of the, you know, the irony. I mean, Reinhold Niebuhr, you know, the theologian who justified both the arms race and the United States’s aggressive stance against the Cold War, was very aware of like the maladies of US society and the dangers of imperialism, but thought the United States needed to embrace a certain historical irony, because the world is a dark and dangerous place, and forces and movement that go beyond mere politics and economics, humanity is motivated by more than rational interests. It has these deep instincts that need to be contained.
And you know, this is where a kind of cheap psychology comes in that becomes very prominent after World War II to justify the containment policy and the role of the United States. The world is a dark place, and it needs to be policed. And the United States has, for all its faults as a liberal empire, needs to do the policing. I think that that’s a deep strut within US Cold War liberalism. You could run it from Niebuhr to Michael Waltz. I remember, after 9/11, Waltz’s justification for supporting Bush’s global War on Terror was, you know, the same thing. The United States might be motivated by immoral, selfish motives, but that doesn’t mean US power can’t bring about good in the world, even if US power is motivated by less than noble motivations. I mean, the irony of all of this is that in the 1960s, to go back to how the Left thought about this, I mean, Lyndon Johnson presided over the greatest expansion of the welfare state in US history, even arguably more than the New Deal, but no leftist thought that the United States was going to bring liberalism to Vietnam. [Laughs] And yet somehow, by the time you get to the 2000s, you had people like Michael Waltz thinking that George W. Bush, he was dismantling the New Deal, was somehow going to bring liberalism to the world. This is a deep structure, that the world needs a gyroscope, that the world needs an organizing principle, that the world needs a policeman to stabilize it, and that the United States is the best option.
But it just glosses over, and a lot of this, of course, harkens back to this mythological history about World War II and what The United States and in Japan and Germany. But all of this just ignores the economics of it. The fact is that the United States was also at the same time promoting an economic system that generates chronic chaos and immiseration. You know, basically the economic program that the United States promoted since the end of the Cold War has created a world of, like, disaster after disaster and deep immiseration and chronic vulnerability and crisis. And we’re not promoting a social-democratic vision of the world in which everybody’s wages, I mean, Henry Wallace, for instance, you know, the leftist vice president of FDR’s third term, or was dropped off the ticket because he was too much of a radical, he was fine with the United States being an empire. All these people were fine with the United States being an empire. But they had a vision of that empire presiding over social-democratic political economy, in which the world’s wages would rise. I mean, Wallace said, We will never defeat fascism until everybody is getting paid the same amount of money, a decent wage, in order to live. And that vision, from that part of the vision of the United States as an empire, is completely erased and down the memory hole, and all we have is the United States as an empire, and there’s no analysis of cause and effect.
I mean, let’s look at Latin America. Look at Central America. Central America is firmly within the United States’s sphere of influence. And if the United States can’t bring stability there, into Central America, and can’t raise the standard of living there, and can’t create a dignified life for the majority of population there, certainly where the United States is firmly in control, then how are we going to do it anywhere else? And the reason why we don’t do it there is we’re promoting economic policies that just generate constant crisis. We’re promoting a vision of economic liberalism that is fundamentally chaotic and fundamentally leads to different forms of authoritarianism.
Adam: Yeah, but it funnels a bunch of money into a couple counties in Virginia and New York. So what you’re saying is that we have the empire, but we don’t even get the like, Napoleonic abolition of feudalism.
[Laughter]
This, I think, is the key, because, again, it seems extremely convenient. And this is what I keep coming back to. It’s like when I first was in Sunday school as a kid, and I was like, Well, that’s pretty convenient that I have the exact right religion. That seems like, what are the odds? There’s like, eight billion people in the world, right?
[Laughter]
Out of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world. And part of me is like, Well, it’d be very convenient, if, like, the US, among the kind of liberal psyche, State Department, you know, nonprofit world, whatever, that we happen to be the benevolent empire, again, reluctantly, always reluctantly, right? The odds of that strikes me as a little convenient. And then people say, Well, what would be the thing that fills the void? And it’s like, well, first off, lots of people, especially people in the Global South, have offered up alternatives, because the idea that the US runs around and determines these things is fundamentally undemocratic. Nobody outside the US, and you could even argue that to a great extent, the poor within the US, don’t actually vote for any of these decisions, right? And you see this all the time, where it’s like, so-and-so country in Africa falls out of the sphere of influence of the US and into the arms of Russia. And it’s like who voted on us to determine the political outcomes of these countries to begin with? And how are these countries ours to lose?
So I think there’s a kind of like faux-savviness to it, right? There’s a kind of like faux-realpolitik, like, that’s just the way it is. You Pollyannaish leftists don’t understand. And I think what you’re arguing is correct, which is that, like, yes, with all your savviness and all your realism, you are planting the seeds of chaos and destruction and violence and extractivism. That is a) destroying the planet vis a vis climate change, but b) I mean, look at Gaza. Look at a situation where even the thinnest pretense of civilizing mission is just completely gone. Inflamed anger throughout the Global South, not just in the so-called Muslim world. Your liberal world order, even when it has all the cards and has all the power, acts in the most aggressively cynical, conquest, sort of Trumpian way. And I guess what you’re arguing, maybe already before, is that Trump is kind of just removing the pretext.
Greg Grandin: Well, there’s that. And I could have my own anti-imperialist realism, you know, that’s not based on the idea of global democracy. But my anti-imperialist realism is that the only way an empire can create a stable system is if it has resistance pushing back against it that is demanding it lives up to its ideals. And for a long time, Latin America was that. Latin America competed with the United States on its own terms and forced the United States, I mean Latin Americans commit to social democracy and to the idea of sovereignty and a just world. At a certain moment when the United States was vulnerable in the 1930s and threatened in the 1930s and ’40s, the United States conceded to Latin America, recognized the ideal of sovereignty, and began to back social democrats and land reform and things like that. So I mean, my anti-imperialism is just as realist as any imperialist. I believe you need resistance in order to have a responsible empire. You know, if you don’t have that resistance, then what you have is what we have now. I mean, Eric Hobsbawm said this, he said, If it wasn’t for the existence of the Soviet Union after World War II, what you probably would have seen, the postwar settlement would have been like a series of authoritarian regimes, some worse than others, rather than this concert of liberal nations that emerged. The only reason you saw that concert of liberal nations that emerged after World War II was because there existed the Soviet Union through, you know, challenging for the mantle of the Enlightenment, and without that, what you have is what you have now.
Nima: Well, let’s actually say, on your book before we let you go. I want more people to hear about it. It is again called America, América: A New History of the New World. It comes out this month, April 2025. Everyone should go pre-order it, or head to your local bookstore the day it comes out, April 22. Greg, tell us a little more about how what you write in your book, what you’ve researched for it, connects with what we’ve been talking about today and also to you know the other issues that you’ve been writing about for so long. It is really illuminating. Really just want to hear about what folks can expect from your new book.
Greg Grandin: Yeah. Well, it’s an argument that to understand the liberal international order, you have to look at the Americas, a contest between Spanish colonialism and British colonialism, and then Latin America and the United States. And it starts with the conquest, the Spanish conquest, and it basically ends with Gaza. I mean, not in any great detail, but it goes up to that, and it looks at the Spanish conquest of the Americas as creating this moral crisis within Catholicism that was profound and had enormous effect. And it didn’t stop the conquest, it didn’t stop the bloodshed, and it didn’t stop the horrors of colonialism, but it did lay the foundation for modern ways of thinking about sovereignty. It created a critique of empire. The Dominicans and other Catholic dissidents within the church questioned and delegitimated the right of Catholic Spain to dominion in the Americas, and even laid the groundwork for a certain kind of pacifism and abolitionism.
And the argument is that this kind of dissident Catholicism, which again, didn’t allay or belay the horrors of the conquest, had existed and continued throughout decades of Spanish colonialism, and actually deepened and it informed the worldview of the independence leaders of Latin America and those who succeeded them in the 19th century, and basically it gave them a worldview that they then applied to the United States. So the original critique of conquest that was formed in the Spanish conquest was then applied by Spanish American republic against an expanding, avaricious, conquering, annexing United States as it moved west and took Texas and took Mexico and took California and took Cuba.
These Spanish American dissidents had a whole worldview that was forged in its relationship to Spain, that then was applied to United States, and that becomes, basically the foundation of the liberal international order, and it goes into the New Deal and Roosevelt’s acceptance of many of the principles of Latin America’s criticism, and then that feeds into what becomes the United Nations and the League of Nations. Latin America comes into existence, or as an already existing League of Nations, or United Nations, seven or eight nations formed at the same time. They had to learn how to live with each other. That’s what’s unprecedented about Latin America. I mean, Europe was a nation of empire. It was a continent of empires. The United States was alone on a continent that it saw as basically its own, and revived the doctrine of conquest as it moved west. And Latin America basically developed lines of legal thinking that fed into what became the liberal world order, which is now being dismantled.
And if you want to look for critiques of empire, look at Lula in Brazil and Gustavo Petro in Colombia and Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, like these are places where real kinds of alternative visions of how to organize the world are still very vibrant and still very alive.
Nima: That is a great place to leave it, not only understanding how we got here, but also where we might be able to go. So I think your book is so critical at this time, probably, sadly so. But Greg, as always, it’s so great to have you on the show. Of course, we’ve been speaking with Greg Grandin, C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, and the author of so many amazing books, including Empire’s Workshop, Fordlandia, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The End of the Myth. His latest, which you can go out and pre-order or buy now, America, América: A New History of the New World, published by Penguin Books. Greg, thank you so much again for joining us on Citations Needed.
Greg Grandin: Oh, thanks again for having me. Thanks, Adam. Thanks, Nima. It’s great to be on.
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Adam: Yeah, again, I think this liberal city-on-a-hill shock, it just gets really old. And I think that cynicism is one of the things that drives the appeal of Trump, because he will sometimes critique those taboos, if not genuinely subvert them once in power. There are literally scores of countries, you know, depending on how you count them, there’s 195 countries on Earth, and the vast majority of them don’t have this kind of bizarre need to sort of dominate everyone else all the time. And to, again, the liberal follow-up is, If we don’t do it, someone who’s more evil will. It’s like, well, that’s kind of convenient. And again, that’s what every empire in history says.
Nima: And the rightwing follow up would be like, Oh, well, why would they even think they could? So obviously, they can’t use that rhetoric because it’s unrealistic. It’s pure might makes right.
Adam: Humiliation, right? There’s no kind of pretense of liberal, like some kind of universalist principle. It’s just, well, fuck ’em. Why not? I was born here, therefore, we’re better. And at least that’s honest.
Nima: But the thing is that Trump’s brand of, you know, everyone must be subjugated, everyone must submit, which is like his driving narrative, right? That’s the framework that everything that he does fits into. It’s why he can say “Little Marco” and then Rubio is made Secretary of State, right? It’s just the subjugation and humiliation that is his whole brand. And so to counter that, whether it’s the Democratic Party or liberals or even more progressives, using the same kind of rhetoric, right? Doing it maybe a little nicer, but using the same kind of, everything is a competition. Everything is about winning. Everything is about beating the other. Everything is about subjugating this adversary, this foreign foe, winds up doing the exact same thing. It’s the same narrative work that’s happening. And so you’re feeding this idea of submission, of subjugation in our media, in our political speech, in our just kind of like common discourse and the way that we view the world, and why, you know, good things can only happen to us if they negatively affect someone else, right? Like, we need better roads, because China has good roads, like that kind of shit.
Adam: There’s a multi-trillion dollar sprawling US imperial machine, both soft and hard power, and it needs a reason to exist. It will self-sustain a reason. And then the War on Terror kind of runs out of gas. And then it’s well, China’s the obvious next step, because they are genuinely rising in the sense that they have more power and influence in the world. And something has to fill that void to justify that system, because otherwise, again, it is just Trumpian might makes right. And for sort of self-styled liberals who, you know, or progressives or centrists who operate within the US State Department and military, they need a narrative. They need a kind of grand narrative. In this, this kind of cheesy authoritarian vs. democratic world, is how they orient it, how they justify it. The British Empire did the same thing with respect to the Belgians, Spanish empires, and the French empires, this is the oldest thing you do in the world.
Nima: If it’s not us, it’ll be someone else. And you don’t want it to be someone else, because then you will be subjugated.
Adam: Yeah. Which worked out well for the multi-trillion dollar, you know, imperial footprint, right? That there happens to have been a moral justification just incidentally sitting right there post-Cold War. Most, again, I cannot stress this enough, most countries on Earth don’t need to have this neurotic–
Nima: Yeah. It’s a little embarrassing.
Adam: Well, yeah, because it’s just assumed to be the sort of ordained, providential purpose of the United States, that we have to dominate and control the world. And if we don’t, some other bad guy will. But we’re not bad guys, and to the extent to which we are occasionally, it’s just a bumbling, We made a mistake. But existentially, we’re fundamentally good because of some lofty concept of democracy or what have you. And I don’t know, it’s all very sort of childish. It’s all very kind of impish.
Nima: Yeah, it’s very juvenile, and it reduces everything to a “USA! USA!” chant, which is just really, really embarrassing. But that will do it for this episode of Citations Needed. Thank you all for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100% listener funded. We don’t run ads, we don’t have corporate sponsors, we do not get grant money from foundations. We are able to do the show because of the generosity and support of listeners like you. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Our production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, April 16, 2025.
