Global Tantrum! with Steve Palley and Prof. Galen Jackson

China’s hackers have reached deep into American networks, but what would it mean to be winning a cyberwar? Steve Palley and Galen Jackson take up Anne Neuberger’s argument that America needs a new strategy of deterrence and The Cyber Gap, by Matthew Ferren, Adam Segal and Rush Doshi. We ask whether weak defenses tell us enough about the larger strategic balance, especially when so much of the offensive side remains classified.

One proposed answer is to build digital twins of critical infrastructure: virtual systems where defenders can test changes without disrupting the real thing. The idea has roots in NASA’s use of models and simulators during Apollo. Could AI make these systems easier to build and useful enough that companies adopt them for their own reasons? Or does the political problem survive the technical solution?

That brings us to regulation, business incentives and the limits of federal action. We revisit the 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy’s push to shift responsibility toward technology providers and discuss the new government-supervised program for private cyber operations against foreign criminal groups. That program requires government oversight and mission approval; it does not grant companies a general license to retaliate on their own.

We close with a question familiar from nuclear strategy: how much relative advantage matters if each side can still impose unacceptable costs? Espionage, theft and a destructive attack during a Taiwan crisis present different problems. The distinction between Salt Typhoon’s telecom espionage and Volt Typhoon’s infrastructure targeting matters here. Better defenses remain worth pursuing even if the claim that China is winning turns out to be harder to establish.

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Two new papers point toward different strategic futures. Eli Sanchez argues that emerging technology is unlikely to make the oceans transparent. Steve Palley and Galen Jackson discuss what that means for submarine survivability, nuclear deterrence, and the political conflicts that a stable balance of terror cannot settle.

Erik Sand’s study of the new missile age presents a more unsettling prospect: precision conventional ICBMs could become militarily relevant within a decade. What happens if distance stops protecting bomber bases and other vulnerable targets? We examine the incentives to strike first and the danger of mistaking a conventional launch for a nuclear attack.

Missile defense offers another complication. The physics of intercepting an ICBM does not become easier because its warhead is conventional. We consider what renewed investment might achieve, what it could do to nuclear stability, and why a successful test or a theater-defense system cannot settle those questions. The discussion also draws on reported threats against US bombers in Britain and the implications of drones reaching aircraft far from a frontline.

Can nuclear deterrence remain robust while conventional warfare becomes more tempting? We close with that tension and a recommendation for The Myth of Military Victory, by Stephen Biddle, Sam Winter-Levy, and Yuri Zhukov. Military capabilities shape the bargaining environment; whether they resolve the political dispute is another question.

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The White House has brought leading AI companies together around voluntary safety commitments. But what does self-policing mean when the same companies are racing to build more capable systems? Steve Palley and Galen Jackson look at the promises, the incentives, and the gap between corporate oversight and public control. The administration’s new terminology order adds another wrinkle: calling everything superintelligence does not settle what the technology can do.

Anthropic’s analysis of GLM-5.3 sharpens the problem. A downloadable model can develop sophisticated cyber exploits, while its safeguards can be weakened or removed. We discuss what those results establish, what they leave uncertain, and why the spread of capabilities changes the choices facing governments and defenders.

We then take up Hal Brands’s argument about America’s superintelligence dilemma, listed in his Foreign Affairs bibliography: pursue supremacy, seek shared development, or try to suppress the technology. Each route has costs. Nuclear and biological arms control offer useful comparisons, but AI’s civilian benefits and wider accessibility make the analogy incomplete. Recent US-China trade arrangements do not amount to an AI governance regime.

Finally, we separate the risks of human-directed attacks from models acting outside their assigned limits. OpenAI’s Hugging Face incident account and Australian incident review make containment a practical question. Alongside the Council on Foreign Relations’ cyber resilience report, these cases raise a harder question: can institutions improve fast enough to handle the systems they are already building?

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The Houthis have rapidly expanded their control along Yemen’s western coast, seizing Mocha and strategically important Red Sea positions. That advance gives them more leverage around the Bab el-Mandeb just as a reported Iran-aligned militia attack put Saudi Arabia’s East-West oil pipeline under pressure.

Riyadh wants help. Mohammed bin Salman reportedly asked Donald Trump to intervene against the Houthis, but the White House held off. Saudi Arabia still has money, reserves, and time, but its reliable ways to move oil around the Strait of Hormuz are narrowing.

Andrew Leber joins us to explain why the Houthis are a harder problem than a conventional Iranian proxy. They receive Iranian support, but they have their own political goals, their own local base, and their own reasons to push for control of Yemen. That independence makes a broader deal with Tehran harder to translate into a durable settlement.

The episode also looks beyond the immediate crisis. The new Makkah defense agreement links Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey, but it does not guarantee that either partner would fight Iran. The United States remains powerful in the region, yet its military capacity and political appetite are both more limited than Gulf allies once assumed.

We ask what Saudi Arabia can still do, whether a renewed bombing campaign would change anything, and whether the least bad option now runs through another uneasy accommodation with Iran and the Houthis.

Further reading: Andrew Leber and Lesley Anne Warner, “The Impacts of the Houthis’ Advance Could Extend Well Beyond Saudi Arabia”, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 23, 2026.

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Steve and Galen look back at September 11 and the decisions that followed, from the first campaign in Afghanistan to the invasion of Iraq and the rise of the Islamic State. The conversation asks which choices were unavoidable, which were errors, and why the difference still matters.

The hosts also trace the roots of al-Qaeda, the Taliban’s sanctuary in Afghanistan, and the regional politics that shaped the wars. The result is less a simple verdict on counterterrorism than a look at how a narrow mission became a much larger project.

A recent Foreign Affairs essay by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon prompts the episode’s second question: what did the war on terror do to American politics? Steve and Galen discuss surveillance, civil liberties, fear, and the long shadow of an open-ended security state.

Twenty-five years on, the costs are easier to count than the alternatives. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates roughly $8 trillion in broad U.S. budgetary costs for the post-9/11 wars. The harder question is what a more limited response could have achieved. Join us for that debate.

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AI is getting better at finding vulnerabilities. Whether that makes the world safer is a different question. Lennart Maschmeyer’s International Security article argues that defenders stand to gain more than attackers. Steve Palley and Galen Jackson use that argument to ask whether increasingly capable AI agents are changing the balance.

We put the article alongside Anthropic’s account of an AI-assisted espionage campaign and the independent investigation of the Hugging Face incident. A system that finds a bug is one thing. An agent that keeps working, coordinates with other agents, and finds ways around obstacles presents a different problem for the people defending a network.

There are two risks running through the discussion: governments using powerful systems against each other, and systems behaving in ways their operators did not intend. The distinction matters for deterrence. We debate whether nuclear weapons are the right comparison, or whether the difficulty of containing biological threats tells us more about what could go wrong.

The United States and China both have reasons to keep pushing. That competitive pressure could make cooperation hardest just when it becomes most useful. We close with the prospects for AI arms control, the danger of a perceived first-strike advantage, and the uncomfortable question of how much control governments and companies can actually retain.

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Would we recognize a world war before historians gave it a name? Bret Stephens’s recent essay gives us a reason to ask. Fighting in Ukraine and the Middle East, cooperation among authoritarian powers, and the possibility of war over Taiwan make the 1930s comparison tempting. Steve Palley and Galen Jackson work through where it helps and where it breaks down.

Nuclear weapons are the biggest difference. They make another march on Berlin hard to imagine, but they also make a confrontation over something a government considers essential far more dangerous. Deterrence might prevent a great-power war. It might also leave leaders gambling inside a crisis they cannot easily control.

Then there’s the question of who could actually fight. Drones are changing the battlefield, American interceptor supplies are strained, and China leads global manufacturing. The industrial advantage that helped the Allies win the last world war cannot simply be assumed this time. Neither can the ability of robots to make war less destructive.

The discussion ends with the United States. Would Americans fight to preserve their position, or try to sit the next conflict out? The current national security strategy still prioritizes Taiwan, even as it turns toward the Western Hemisphere. We also get into debt, the dollar, and whether a shift in economic power could settle the contest before the military question is answered.

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The United States and Canada have spent decades building one of the deepest economic relationships in the world. Cars and their components cross the border repeatedly, supply chains are tightly integrated, and the two countries traded about $872.3 billion in goods and services in 2025. Now Donald Trump is treating that interdependence as leverage rather than an alliance.

The immediate dispute is narrow but revealing. Washington imposed 50 percent tariffs on nearly $20 billion in Canadian vehicles, alcohol, and dairy after negotiations collapsed. Mark Carney recalled Canada’s team and promised dollar-for-dollar counter-tariffs on a broader group of American goods beginning September 8. The disagreement is not only about those products or French-language rules. It is about whether Canada remains free to set its own trade policy, including a new quota allowing up to 49,000 Chinese-made electric vehicles per year at the 6.1 percent most-favored-nation tariff.

We talk through why Carney chose confrontation, why the political costs may land in precisely the American states Trump needs before the midterms, and why tariffs are not a bill sent to a foreign government. They are collected from importers and, as recent Federal Reserve work shows, most of the burden falls on domestic firms and consumers.

The larger question is what replaces the trading system Trump is breaking. Galen discusses Lori Wallach’s Foreign Affairs article, “The Right Way to Balance Trade,” which proposes balanced trade, shared labor and environmental standards, and coordinated pressure on countries running persistent surpluses. The old order produced cheaper goods, but it also contributed to deindustrialization, concentrated corporate power, and brittle supply chains. Reform was overdue. Destruction is not the same thing as reform.

Canada may be smaller, but it is not behaving like a vassal. The episode asks whether Washington is gaining anything durable by humiliating its closest partner, and whether other countries will respond by accepting American leadership or by building a trading system that leaves the United States behind.

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The Houthis have declared a maritime blockade against Saudi-linked shipping in the Red Sea, attacked vessels near the Bab el-Mandeb, and renewed strikes on Saudi energy infrastructure. The immediate trigger was a July strike that disabled the runway at Sana’a airport as an Iranian flight attempted to land, but the confrontation rests on a much older Saudi-Houthi conflict.

We trace the Houthis from their roots in Yemen’s Zaydi community through the fall of Ali Abdullah Saleh, the seizure of Sana’a, and the Saudi-led war that failed to dislodge them. That history matters because the movement is not merely an Iranian unit operating abroad. It is locally embedded, increasingly capable of producing and adapting weapons, and able to exploit terrain that makes outside military victory extraordinarily difficult.

The strategic distinction is between controlling territory and controlling risk. The Houthis do not need to dominate the Red Sea to raise shipping costs, threaten Saudi export routes, or force much larger states to divert scarce defenses. The Bab el-Mandeb is valuable precisely because a relatively small force can impose consequences far beyond Yemen.

That helps explain why Iran’s regional network has survived repeated predictions of collapse. A recent Foreign Affairs analysis argues that the Axis of Resistance has become more decentralized, locally supplied, and resilient. China also complicates Western pressure by providing an alternative market and supply base even when it is acting from narrow commercial interests rather than ideological alignment.

This week, we ask what Saudi Arabia thought it could gain by reopening a front it could not win before, whether economic pressure can produce an off-ramp with Iran, and why accommodation may ultimately look more realistic than another round of bombing.

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Galen Jackson’s new War on the Rocks essay examines five regime-change campaigns, from Suez and Lebanon to Iraq, Libya, and Iran, and asks why outside powers keep making the same gamble.

The central mistake is confusing tactical success with political control. Great powers can destroy targets, topple governments, and kill leaders. They cannot manufacture legitimacy, national cohesion, or a stable replacement regime.

Why keep trying? Decapitation looks cheap and decisive, military superiority feels like political leverage, and occasional apparent successes in places such as Panama and Venezuela invite bad analogies. In the Middle East, nationalism, weak institutions, and rival intervention make the wager even worse.

We discuss Galen’s article, the failures from Iran in 1953 to Libya in 2011, the comparisons with Germany, Japan, and Latin America, and why the current Iran war shows that the old lesson still has not been learned.

Also in this episode: we talk about a quieter change in academic publishing. Peer-reviewed journals still reward rigor, but they are slow, expensive, and often inaccessible outside universities. Hybrid outlets such as War on the Rocks let scholars bring research-based arguments to policymakers and the public, though tenure incentives have not fully caught up. In an era of abundant opinion and declining trust in expertise, we argue that academics should engage more without abandoning the standards that make their expertise worth hearing.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com