So before we continue to why America is treating its most integrated ally like Iran, like an adversary right now, why? Why is this happening with the Democrats? Why are they why is the other side of politics allowing this to happen? Is it because there is a willingness within the American political class to get to rule over this technocracy of America that's been delineated on maps?

Yeah.

I mean, so the Democrats have you kind of hinted at it.

They've they have set up Trump to do all the things that Trump is doing.

That's right.

Like Trump couldn't couldn't do couldn't randomly invade Iran and then blow through 60% of our munitions stockpile.

If you didn't stockpile him in the first place with it, you, you let him inherit a trillion dollar war machine.

Can you please give us a bit on that, mate?

Who follows this stuff? I don't think they're going to be totally clued in on exactly what the timeline is and what the stakes are.

Yeah, I should say too, I mentioned that I had been part of the national security state as if that's some sort of great credential.

I have come out on the other side of this thing, and in the past 10 years, I've become functionally an anti-imperialist, democratic socialist.

I'm a pretty harsh critic of the national security state, and the uniqueness of that is...

The position that I had, the roles that I had, makes that something that nobody does.

I'm a traitor to my white-collar class or whatever.

The immediate thing that I was responding to in the post and what's been going on the past week was, Okay, so back up slightly.

So

There's no way that you can look at power from the standpoint of its victims and ever see anything the same again.

This is what powers me to jump on the fucking mic every week.

This is what powers me to write the newsletter.

This is what powers me to go to protests, to reach to students, to, to do research and write books and shit.

This is like my whole fucking fire in my belly, man.

You must refuse empire.

Not great.

This...

Is the Trump administration doing insider trading?

I mean, the short answer is yes.

On Polymarket, I think the amount that was made or bet or won in relation to the Iran war was only like a couple million dollars.

So the literal betting, as in like gambling on the timing of decisions and everything and outcomes of war, not a ton of money involved, but clear signs of insider trading.

The real corruption is the financial actors who trade oil futures.

So there's a bunch of reports of like surges of oil futures trading activity right before Trump announced updates to the Iran war and the back and forth of like ceasefire, no ceasefire, ceasefire, no ceasefire.

Right.

I guess my final question is, to what extent, in your opinion, is New Zealand affected by these sort of military-industrial complexes?

Is the Trump administration doing insider trading?

I mean, the short answer is yes.

On Polymarket, I think the amount that was made or bet or won in relation to the Iran war was only like a couple million dollars.

So the literal betting, as in like gambling on the timing of decisions and everything and outcomes of war, not a ton of money involved, but clear signs of insider trading.

The real corruption is the financial actors who trade oil futures.

So there's a bunch of reports of like surges of oil futures trading activity right before Trump announced updates to the Iran war and the back and forth of like ceasefire, no ceasefire, ceasefire, no ceasefire.

Right.

I guess my final question is, to what extent, in your opinion, is New Zealand affected by these sort of military-industrial complexes?

That was back in the aughts. Um, well, all right, so let's, let's start with the, um, the argument that yo- uh, that you all are making in the, the book is the, i- i- in many respects is this notion that somehow the Cold War, uh, with Russia was a benefit, uh, to the United States, to the world at large. And that in somehow there are benefits to be gained with, um, I guess engaging in what is known as, um, the, uh, great power, uh, competition or rivalry. There are actually people who, who sort of promote this as a way of like, I guess, I don't know, maybe it's something like, uh, sort of extension of that libertarian ideology of, like, people, uh, functioning in their own best interest ends up, uh, somehow helping, uh, society. But tell us the m-... Let's start with the, the myth of, of the Cold War being beneficial, uh, broadly speaking.

Yeah. That's a good place to start. And, uh, my co-author and I, we sort of came to this project during the Biden, early Biden administration when, like, people that, like, I had been friends with in the sort of Democratic Party foreign policy milieu, you know, the sort of mandarins who are cer-... who, who ended up becoming Biden's staff, like Kurt Campbell, Jake Sullivan, and these guys. They basically built their whole orientation in foreign policy and their whole domestic economic project around confrontation with China, around re-asserting American primacy in the way that we relate to the world. Sometimes we would just, like, code it gently as, like, American global leadership or something. But we're talking about, like, uh...... hegemony, domination of the world, you know? (laughs) And like, but, and we were using China as like the gateway to that. And one of the arguments that we kept seeing these guys, my one-time friends making was like, you know, the Cold War is why we had civil rights. The Cold War was good for the labor movement. The Cold War can make us the best version of ourselves. And we were like, "What the fuck are they talking about?" Like, the Cold War that I knew had 14 to 20 million people die and we just don't keep it in our historical memory 'cause there was brown and Black bodies in the, in the third world, you know? The Cold War that I knew was like 60 plus US attempts at regime change, 40 something of which were on the side of autocracy in the Cold War. The Cold War risked global annihilation of us all, multiple times. The Cold War sucked by like any clear-eyed, non-cherry-picked understanding of history, you know? And so we were like, these guys are using a bad heroic elite kind of aristocratic understanding, like a great man of history understanding of the past to justify doing militarism right now. And it's a really... And I think some of them had good intentions, but it was just a really bad reading of history and we're like, "This is a bad bet, dude." And we could see already by 2021, just the fact that like Trump had been hyping up the China threat in his first term led to all this huge spike in anti-Asian violence in the US. The surveillance and oppression of... and then the forcing to the fleeing of scientists who happened to be Asian or Chinese, you know? Like, we were seeing a kind of red scare happening amid so many other things that were happening and we're like, "This is just the tip of the iceberg." Like, this entire project that we've got of an America is gonna go down if, if we end up trying to confront a big bad rather than deal with our problems, right? Rather than, (laughs) rather than attend to social democracy at home, we're going to defer social democracy in the name of fighting a big bad. So our, our meta-argument ended up being that like if we paid a little more attention to history from the perspective of its victims, we would see that geopolitical rivalry tends to be the enemy of all the things that we think are good. Peace and democracy, not least.

They all went around the room again, uh, four months later, same thing. After hadn't thought about it, same person said China. That person never showed up again. It was Cheney, uh, Li- it was either Liz or Lynn, I can never remember which one, but this is back in 2000, right? And so, um, I'm quite convinced the whole Project for a New American Century and the Iraq War was very much about trying to contain China in some fashion. Um, so this is, this is preexisting out there. These guys from the Biden administration weren't saying, "We should start this thing with China to help with domestic." Or are they just saying, "We should exploit this thing with China to help domestic, or we should tamp down issues with a rivalry with China for these benefits?"

The... Yeah. So those are all great points, like the, the Biden guys were kind of improvising foreign policy. Like, it was an opportunistic thing. What is it in the political landscape that, of elites, not the masses, that can move things, especially on Capitol Hill? Well, it's the China boogeyman, right? And they were getting, like, I mean, you know this, especially going back to the Gary Hart days. Democrats have always been defined by their right flank, you know? And like especially on foreign policy. All Republicans have to do is say like a Democrat is weak on national security, and then the Democrats get all frothy about trying to out-hawk everybody. And so like when Trump started calling Biden, you know, in 2020 Beijing Biden and all this stuff, and like, you know, he's weak on China, and that was the Republican messaging campaign basically for 2020 up and down the ticket. Like, that, that created an incentive for the, the Democratic foreign policy people to try and out-hawk Trump. And so they ended up preserving and expanding all the blacklists of Chinese companies that Trump had started, all the tariffs that Trump had started, suspension of visas for Chinese students. Like, the whole thing, the FBI, you know, China initiative program that they had, which was basically racist. Um, that like, that continued in all but name under Biden. And then the most important piece of all of this is the Pentagon, is defense spending. You know, like all of that hangs on the China threat. And this, the, the thing about Project for a New American Century and Liz Cheney and all that is really important in a larger sense because the Democratic Party foreign policy, and you saw this under Biden, it's indistinguishable from the platform of Project for a New American Century. Like missile defense, China rivalry, uh you know, just the, like the military spending, space weapons. It's all the stuff that they wanted, you know? Um, and so now the Democratic Party has basically become neocons on foreign policy. And the Republican Party, if you're gonna be a neocon, you have to be a convert to MAGA, you know, and, and sign onto this bizarro-like imperialist stuff. (laughs) But, but, um, yeah. So like the China stuff has been in the background this whole time. The difference in the past 10, 12 years is that great power of competition is a fancy way of talking about inter-imperial rivalry, you know. Neoliberal globalization, it started paying like fewer and fewer dividends over time, right? With like, in the wake of the global financial crisis and the Great Recession. Globalization stopped paying off even for the, the haves, and so global growth stagnated.And when that started to happen, China and the US both turned to economic nationalism. And part of economic nationalism is necessarily like jingoism and, you know, military one-upmanship and all that stuff. So, both great powers are exploiting the advantages afforded by their powerful states, uh, by their favorable positions in the world system to claim a larger share of a shrinking economic pie, you know? And that's, that's the paradigm that we're in now. It's basically like state capitalism. Trump just does it in like a way that is like really focused on his corrupt oligarchic interests. But that, that was what we started doing under Biden too.