Michael Brenes and Van Jackson on Why U.S.-China Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy

This week on Sinica, recorded at Yale University, I speak with Michael Brenes and Van Jackson, coauthors of The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy. Their argument is that framing the U.S.-China relationship as geopolitical rivalry has become more than just a foreign policy orientation — it's a domestic political project that reshapes budgets, norms, and coalitions in ways that actively harm American democracy and the American people. Rivalry narrows political possibility, makes dissent suspect, encourages neo-McCarthyism (the China Initiative, profiling of Chinese Americans), produces anti-AAPI hate, and redirects public investment away from social welfare and into defense spending through what they call "national security Keynesianism."

Mike is interim director of the Brady Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, while Van is a senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington and host of the Un-Diplomatic Podcast. We discuss the genesis of their collaboration during the Biden administration, how they navigate China as a puzzle for the American left, canonical misrememberings of the Cold War that distort current China policy, the security dilemma feedback loop between Washington and Beijing, why defense-heavy stimulus is terrible at job creation, how rivalry politics weakens democracy, recent polling showing a shift toward engagement, and their vision for a "geopolitics of peace" anchored in Sino-U.S. détente 2.0.

5:47 – The genesis of the book: recognizing Biden's Cold War liberalism

11:26 – How they approached writing together from different disciplinary homes

13:20 – Navigating China as a puzzle for the American left

21:39 – How great power competition hardened from analytical framework into ideology

28:15 – Mike on two canonical misrememberings of the Cold War

33:18 – Van on the security dilemma and the nuclear feedback loop

39:55 – National security Keynesianism: why defense spending is bad at job creation

44:38 – How rivalry politics weakens democracy and securitizes dissent

48:09 – Building durable coalitions for restraint-oriented statecraft

51:27 – Has the post-COVID moral panic actually abated?

53:27 – The master narrative we need: a geopolitics of peace

55:29 – Associative balancing: achieving equilibrium through accommodation, not arms

Recommendations:

Van: The Long Twentieth Century by Giovanni Arrighi

Mike: The World of the Cold War: 1945-1991 by Vladislav Zubok

Kaiser: Pluribus (Apple TV series by Vince Gilligan)

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