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

In this episode of the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser Kuo interviews Van Jackson and Michael Brenes, the authors of "The Rivalry Peril," about their book's argument that framing the U.S.-China relationship as a geopolitical rivalry harms American democracy and its people. They discuss how this rivalry redirects public investment towards defense, encourages McCarthyism, and produces anti-AAPI hate. The conversation explores the genesis of the book, the authors' diverse disciplinary backgrounds, and their perspectives on China from a left-leaning viewpoint. They delve into the mechanisms that have solidified great power competition as an unquestionable premise in American foreign policy, the misremembered lessons of the Cold War, and the feedback loop of threat inflation between the U.S. and China. The discussion also covers national security Keynesianism, the weakening of democracy, and the need for durable coalitions for restraint-oriented statecraft, concluding with recommendations for a geopolitics of peace and a Sino-U.S. detente 2.0 based on associative balancing.