After the ‘End of History’

Welcome back to After the End of History. This discussion was recorded on August 27th, 2026.

The many false starts and stops of the war on Iran tell us, unhappily and perversely, that this conflict will stretch well into our future – just as we recognize its long past continuity from the 2016 strikes on Syria to the war on Iran in 1980 just after its revolution. This follows recent episodes where we talked to Brandon Wolff -Hunnicutt about the Iraq wars, and Nicholas Mulder about sanctions often preparing and precipitating total war. The long draw up to this war, and its likely duration, suggest that Iran’s sin against the West is not only its success in outmaneuvering sanctions but the Islamic Republic itself as a future-orientated form, birthed by necessity, that contributes a heretofore unknown model of popular democracy underwritten by religious law.

Our guest today describes the life and ideas of Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the IR, which initiated a process that continues to develop and deepen even in a war against the world super-power. Dr. Nura Hossainzadeh is the author of the 2016 dissertation in Political Science at UC Berkeley, “The Constitutionalism of Ruhollah Khomeini's Theory of Guardianship.” 

(read it here: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4rg2c49c ), as well as recent articles in Middle East Eye: www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/how-boogeyman-mullahs-trope-led-us-war-iran

In conversation with our own Pat Cabell, she describes the constitutionalist responses to Iran’s early 20th Century occupations by imperial powers, and how conceptions of anti-imperialism turned to the Islamic tradition for guidance. This is a rich and rarely heard perspective on Iran as not disfigured by its battle with the empire but emboldened to inaugurate a new stage in the journey of spirit, and a new chapter of revolution, akin to the historical role of the Mexican and Russian peasants at the beginning of the century.

A partial list of works mentioned in this discussion:
- Homa Katouzian. Iran and the Revolution (2026)
- Vali Nasr. Iran's Grand Strategy (2025)
- Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi. Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and
Reform in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2019) as well as
https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/mosaic-of-deterrence/
- Ruhollah Khomeini. (anonymous) Kashf al-Âsrâr (unveiling of secrets). 1943.
- Khomeini. Hukumat-i Islami: Velayat-e faqih (Governance of the Jurist). 1970.

Hawks and Sparrows is a research collective that has been publishing and podcasting about international relations, Marxist and conservative political philosophy, history and aesthetics since 2020. Our primary archive can be found at the Patreon page for the After the End of History podcast patreon.com/afterhistory where you can also subscribe and support our work.

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Welcome back to our jaunt through Alejo Carpentier’s “El siglo de las luces”, a maritime escapade in the Americas at the time of the French Revolution. With some of the literary theory covered already in episode 1, where we made the case for why this is a unique example of historical realism, we finally enjoy retelling the arc of the story and reading sections of its lurid prose. A deserted island boar feast, a guillotine being rowed into Guadalupe’s bay by starlight, former revolutionaries reimposing slavery amidst the malarial swamp of Guyane… this one’s got it all. 

[Recorded December 2025]

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[Recorded on 29 July 2025.] 

We sat down with the always insightful Christopher Mott of the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy to talk about the patterns of American culture and their effects on foreign policy. His distinctive blend of cultural criticism, global history, and strategic thinking were on full display. Listeners will enjoy our discussion of the deep history of Eurasia in his 2015 book The Formless Empire: A Short History of Warfare and Diplomacy in Central Asia. We asked him questions about his amazing white paper Woke Imperium: The Coming Confluence Between Social Justice and Neoconservatism and the sarcastic wisdom found on his blog The Trickster’s Guide to Geopolitics. But the core of our conversation revolved around the prospects of a new realism in American foreign policy since the disasters of Ukraine, the Middle East and looming war with China. 

Links:

The Formless Empire: A Short History of Diplomacy and Warfare in Central Asia

Woke-Imperium

The Trickster's Guide to Geopolitics | International Relations for the Outsider

Modus Vivendi: Realism's Missing Link

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[Recorded 31 January 2025]

A continuation of our discussion on Marx's "forgotten text," Herr Vogt: A Spy in the Workers' Movement. 

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Welcome back to our mini-series on realism and the Latin American novel. In this episode, we provide a thorough engagement with the late Peruvian master, Mario Vargas Llosa, an author of major works from all the way back in the 1950s to the current decade. Pat speaks with Neil Larsen, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, about his seminal essay, “Mario Vargas Llosa: The Realist as Neo-Liberal.” What makes Vargas Llosa revolutionary as a storyteller, but a reactionary ideologue? We cast a glance over Perú’s distinct 20th century history and how Vargas Llosa’s anti-leftism oddly heralded the Milei/Bolsonaro New Right, possibly soon to include Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of former Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori. Thus, we discuss in detail Vargas Llosa's great novel Historia de Mayta, about a failed 1958 highlands insurgency, written during the Sendero Luminoso uprising. We also consider two of Vargas Llosa's strongest 21st Century works, the interlinked La Fiesta del Chivo (2000) about the Dominican Republic and Tiempos Récios (2019) about Guatemala, which seem to confirm Neil’s thesis that despite his reactionary politics he couldn’t help but depict a CIA coup with anything but bone-chilling precision and sober pessimism.

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[Recorded on 15 December 2025]

In this opening installment of our series on literary realism, we focus on Alejo Carpentier’s El siglo de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral). This work holds particular significance for the show, as host Pat dedicated a substantial portion of his dissertation to Carpentier's life and literature. We approach the novel as a primary example of how literature can map the "grand epochal changes" of history.

After a brief biographical sketch of Carpentier, we present his work against the volatile backdrop of the French Revolution as it spreads to the Caribbean, centering on the dual struggles for abolition and independence. Our analysis is framed by the perspective of Perry Anderson, who identifies realism as a vital academic and political project. Further, by engaging with the work of Georg Lukács and Fredric Jameson, we use this episode to reconstruct a theory of "the totality," the idea that the things we read and watch are not isolated incidents but parts of a larger, ensnaring system. 

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We sat down with Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt, Associate Professor of History at California State University Stanislaus. He specializes in the history of the modern Middle East, American foreign policy, and the political economy of oil and natural gas. His previous book The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq was the subject of one of our first interviews at After the End of History. The book details a number of historical transitions: the shifting of American business and political coalitions as the Texan oil majors gained the upper hand in setting foreign policy, especially in the presidency of LBJ, the origins of OPEC as developmentalist growth model for Arab nationalists, and the conflicts between layers of the Iraqi military in 1960s. Brandon has also published articles in the journals Diplomatic History, Diplomacy and Statecraft, and Reviews in American History. 

In this episode, we discuss the continued power of the Neoconservative tendency in setting the agenda of American foreign policy, the nature of the Israel Lobby, and comparisons between the leadup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the current US/Israeli war on Iran.

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Nicholas Mulder is an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Cornell University. His previous book is The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War and he is currently close to completion on a book entitled The Age of Confiscation: Making and Taking Property in the Creation of the Modern World. He also started a Substack last year which contains some of the best commentary on the geo-economic conflicts unfolding before our eyes, often with very useful historical analogies for thinking about sanctions, embargoes and tariffs. It is called WeltinnenPolitik. 

It is hard to imagine a book being published at a more perfect time than Nicholas Mulder’s 2022 book The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War. After the start of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent announcements of massive US-NATO sanctions against Russia, many of us turned to Mulder’s book to try to make sense of our period of great power tensions, economic and technological competition, and major war in Europe. The Economic Weapon brought readers a fresh and technical analysis for interpreting the breakdown of peace in the interwar period and the dashing of liberal visions of international cooperation. Most importantly, Mulder’s book did not just reaffirm the well-known cliches of liberal orthodoxy about free societies versus totalitarianism, but situated economic sanctions as a paradoxical tool of coercion and warfare - sometimes conceived as preventing war, while other times as precipitating it. 

His story begins with the efforts of British naval officials and financial authorities during WWI to leverage British naval power to enforce a blockade against the Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The central paradox of his narrative is how a tool originally designed to escalate a total war strategy and coerce civilian populations would come to be thought of as a tool in preventing aggression in the League of Nations. While sometimes effective, Mulder also shows how diplomatic wrangling, ideological competition and the Great Depression often blunted multilateral commitment to use the economic weapon properly. And fear of sanctions by the late 1930s itself became a driver of strategic visions that saw territorial expansion as the only way to secure the energy, food and extractive resources that could maintain the viability of revisionist states. While far from any kind of apologia for the actions taken by the Axis powers, there is something in your account of the spirit of AJP Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War in which the Allied Powers are not absolved of some blame. 

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We have a YouTube channel at last: https://www.youtube.com/@HawksandSparrowsPodcast

Please subscribe, like and share. Below we've shared the latest. 

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Hawks and Sparrows discuss the best tweets comprising the situation in Venezuela on day 1 of the US's attack. 

-Cravenness of Sanders and the NYT's long history of hating Maduro 
-Hopes for anti-war revival in the US
-Balance of forces across Latin America
-RIP Asad Haider

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Hawks and Sparrows is a research collective that has been publishing and podcasting about international relations, marxist and conservative political philosophy, history and aesthetics since 2020. Our primary page and archive can be found at the Patreon page for the After the End of History podcast https://www.patreon.com/c/afterhistory/ where you can also subscribe and support our work. 
Follow this Yt channel for deep dives on major events in geo-politics and interviews with thinkers across the spectrum wrestling with issues like the history of espionage, transformations in the use and nature of propaganda, and populist or non-partisan orientations towards socialism and anti-imperialism. 
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Interest in Karl Marx is surging amidst current debates on economic inequality. Join us as we sit down with historian Andrew Hartman to discuss his fascinating new book, Karl Marx in America, a comprehensive account of how Marx's writings have been used and interpreted in the United States from the late 19th century through the modern era.

Professor Hartman explores the century-plus evolution of Marxism in America, including how early socialists navigated the unique social and cultural conditions that underpin ideas of "American exceptionalism." We delve into Marx's own surprising views on American economic and political life, including his writings for the New York Daily Tribune and his thoughts on the Civil War.

Our discussion also illuminates the critical debates surrounding W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction, analyzing whether Du Bois was adapting Marx to the American racial order or revealing something essential that others had overlooked. The episode also explores the chilling effect of the Cold War on the reception of Marx's thought, the complexities of Cold War liberalism, and the long-term influence of Trotskyism and the New York Intellectuals. Finally, we consider the legacy of the New Left's focus on cultural criticism and how future historians might judge their contributions. Don't miss this essential deep dive into a powerful, enduring, and often contradictory intellectual history.

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