Global Tantrum! with Steve Palley and Prof. Galen Jackson

In a recent statement, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi argued that a Chinese attack or blockade of Taiwan would constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan. That phrasing matters. Under Japan’s postwar legal framework, it is the specific language that allows Tokyo to participate in collective military defense alongside the United States.

This is not abstract signaling. It is a quiet but meaningful shift in Japanese security policy.

China reacted forcefully. Trade restrictions. Cultural retaliation. Increased gray-zone pressure around disputed islands. Diplomatic outreach to Europe and Washington. The response was coordinated and familiar—what’s often described as “wolf warrior” diplomacy. Beijing took the comment seriously because it changes the strategic equation.

Why?

First, Japan is not a minor player. Even after decades of self-imposed restraint, it remains a $4–5 trillion economy with world-class industrial and technological capacity. As defense spending rises toward 2% of GDP, Japan is acquiring advanced U.S. strike systems, fortifying its southwestern islands, and preparing explicitly for scenarios involving Taiwan. Small percentage changes translate into very real military power.

Second, history looms large. Japan’s imperial expansion and wartime atrocities in China remain deeply unresolved issues. Chinese leaders interpret Japanese nationalism not as domestic politics but as a warning sign. Takaichi’s ideological lineage and rhetoric land squarely in that historical context.

From Japan’s perspective, the logic is straightforward. Japan imports most of its energy, much of it transiting waters near Taiwan. Chinese control of Taiwan would put Japan’s economic lifelines—and parts of its territory—at risk. Whatever ambiguity exists in U.S. policy, Tokyo’s interests are not ambiguous at all.

Public opinion inside Japan is more divided. Support for involvement in a Taiwan conflict depends heavily on U.S. participation. Without Washington, Japan is unlikely to act alone. With Washington, support exists—but narrowly. That makes American credibility the central variable.

Which brings us to the uncomfortable bottom line: the Taiwan Strait is probably the most dangerous place in the world right now.

China may prefer a blockade over an invasion, forcing the allies to decide whether and how to respond. Japan’s statement raises the stakes of that choice. The status quo is already eroding, and every actor involved understands that the next move—especially from Beijing—could reshape the regional order for decades.

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More on the 2025 National Security StrategyGreat-power realism, MAGA internationalism, and the contradictions at the heart of Trump’s worldview

STEVE PALLEYNOV 2025

Last episode, we walked through the opening logic of Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy: its populist tone, its rejection of post–Cold War overextension, and its attempt to reframe U.S. grand strategy around sovereignty, restraint, and balance-of-power politics. This week, having actually read the full document, we go deeper—and the picture gets stranger.

At its best, the strategy gestures toward something serious. It rejects global primacy, emphasizes great-power competition over moral crusades, and repeatedly insists that American power should be concentrated, not diffused. Those are not fringe ideas. They echo long-standing realist critiques of U.S. foreign policy since the 1990s, and in places—especially on China—the document sounds more pragmatic than Trump’s first-term strategy.

But layered on top of that realism is something else entirely: an illiberal ideological project that sits uneasily with the document’s stated goals. Again and again, the strategy claims to oppose interference in other nations’ domestic affairs—while simultaneously endorsing the active reshaping of allied democracies along MAGA lines. The contradiction is not subtle.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Europe section. On the surface, the strategy calls for familiar things: more European defense spending, an end to the war in Ukraine, and a stable long-term relationship with Russia. Reasonable people can debate all of that. But then the text veers sharply into civilizational language—warning that Europe is losing its identity, condemning migration, and pledging to “cultivate resistance” to Europe’s current political trajectory from within. That is not realism. It is ideological intervention, and it amounts to an explicit endorsement of nationalist, illiberal movements across the continent.

Asia, by contrast, is treated with surprising restraint. China is framed less as an existential enemy than as a durable competitor with whom the United States must find a workable equilibrium. The document emphasizes deterrence over confrontation, economic competition over military escalation, and alliance burden-sharing over unilateral dominance. There are few details and many unanswered questions—but the tone reflects a grudging recognition that China is here to stay, and that coexistence, however tense, may be unavoidable.

The Western Hemisphere reveals the same tension in a different form. The so-called “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine blends traditional hemispheric priorities—migration control, drug trafficking, regional stability—with blunt economic coercion and performative dominance. In practice, tariffs and pressure campaigns against countries like Brazil and Canada risk alienating precisely the partners the strategy claims to “enlist and expand.” What reads as strategic focus often looks, in execution, like punitive instinct.

Elsewhere, the gaps are telling. Africa is reduced to a footnote: no aid, minimal engagement, vague concern about terrorism. The Middle East is treated as a problem the United States would prefer to stop thinking about—an attitude every recent administration has shared, with mixed results. Energy policy dismisses climate change outright while doubling down on fossil fuels, even as technological competition in renewables accelerates abroad.

Taken together, the 2025 National Security Strategy is not incoherent—but it is internally conflicted. It combines classical balance-of-power thinking with a populist, nationalist ideology that actively undermines its own realist premises. Realism traditionally seeks to drain ideology from foreign policy. This document replaces one ideology with another.

The result is a strategy that wants restraint without reciprocity, sovereignty without pluralism, and stability without tolerance. Whether that combination can produce durable order—or simply new forms of backlash—remains the open question at the heart of Trump’s vision for America’s role in the world.

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Every few years, a U.S. administration publishes its National Security Strategy—a grand, self-congratulatory mission statement that tells the world what Washington thinks it stands for. Most are boring, bureaucratic, and easy to ignore. The 2025 version under Trump is not one of those.

This document reads less like a policy white paper and more like a manifesto. It’s part ideological declaration, part foreign policy blueprint, and part campaign ad. From the opening pages—where Trump boasts of “obliterating” Iran’s nuclear facilities and “settling eight raging conflicts”—the tone is unmistakable: America is back, the elites are out, and the era of global restraint is over.

What’s striking isn’t the chest-thumping. It’s the reordering of priorities. The document opens with an “America First” premise so absolute that even earlier nationalist playbooks look tame. The top strategic priority is not China, Russia, or the Middle East—it’s the Western Hemisphere. Trump’s team even coins a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine: the U.S. will use force to prevent mass migration, keep out “hostile foreign ownership,” and assert total dominance across the Americas. It’s a throwback to the early 20th century—part Roosevelt, part Reagan, all Trump.

The rest of the strategy cascades from that worldview. The Indo-Pacific comes second, framed not as a defense of democracy but as a fight to “halt and reverse the damage foreign actors inflict on the American economy.” Europe appears third, with a pointed promise to “restore Europe’s civilizational self-confidence”—a polite way of saying Washington intends to bankroll nationalist governments over Brussels technocrats. The Middle East gets one line about avoiding “forever wars,” and then comes the fifth “region”: technology. AI, quantum, biotech—treated here as battlefields on par with geography itself.

At home, the strategy’s language tilts even harder toward cultural revolution. Trump calls for a “restoration of America’s spiritual and cultural health” and “strong traditional families that raise healthy children.” It’s the first time an NSS has explicitly fused domestic identity politics with national defense—turning family policy, immigration, and even birth rates into instruments of security.

Read together, the 2025 NSS is less about managing threats than about remaking the idea of what America is for. It marks the formal arrival of a populist, nationalist grand strategy—one that sees foreign policy, economics, and culture as part of a single struggle against decline. Whether it endures beyond this administration will depend on whether Americans come to see it as strategy—or simply as ideology dressed in statecraft.

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For the first time in nearly four years of war, the U.S. has taken direct aim at the beating heart of Russia’s economy: its oil exports.

The Trump administration’s new sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia’s two biggest energy companies, block both American and foreign firms from doing business with them. In practical terms, that means any bank or corporation that wants access to U.S. markets now has to choose—us or them.

It’s a major escalation. With these measures, over 75% of Russia’s oil exports are now under Western sanctions. The move comes after months of stalled diplomacy, as Trump reportedly grew frustrated with Putin’s refusal to strike a peace deal in Ukraine. After trying the carrot, he’s finally reached for the stick.

The timing matters. Russia’s finances are starting to buckle. Its once-strong energy revenues are down sharply, its budget deficit is ballooning, and its vaunted “rainy day” sovereign wealth fund has dwindled from hundreds of billions to around $50 billion. The war has turned into a treadmill of attrition—territorially, militarily, and financially—and Moscow is running out of runway.

Unlike the Iraq or Iran sanctions of past decades, these aren’t meant to destroy an economy overnight. They’re designed to bleed it slowly. Russia can still sell oil—to China, India, and a few others—but only at steep discounts and in currencies it doesn’t want, like yuan and rupees. The dollar system, centered on SWIFT and U.S. clearinghouses, still rules global trade. For now.

That’s the hidden risk. Every time Washington uses the dollar as a weapon, it gives the rest of the world another reason to find a way around it. De-dollarization is still a distant prospect, but a real one. The dollar’s share of global reserves has slipped below 60% for the first time in decades. Too much pressure, and countries will start building parallel systems—China already is.

So the new sanctions are both a warning shot and a test. For Putin, it’s a countdown: he has maybe a year before his war chest runs dry. For the United States, it’s a question of restraint: how much can you weaponize a financial empire before you start eroding the very power that makes it work?

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A few days ago, half the internet went dark.

A single botched DNS update inside Amazon Web Services—one bad line of code—took down everything from Slack and Starbucks to Roblox, Zoom, and Venmo. For most of a day, billions of dollars of global commerce and communication froze because a single server cluster in Northern Virginia couldn’t talk to the rest of the world.

This wasn’t a cyber attack. It was a self-inflicted wound. But as we discuss in this episode, it showed how fragile the internet really is. The global network that was designed to survive nuclear war now depends on a handful of private data centers and three American companies. The architecture of resilience has quietly turned into one of concentration.

From there, we zoom out. If AWS going down for twelve hours can paralyze the world economy, what could a deliberate cyber strike do? We talk through Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, North Korea’s Lazarus Group, China’s massive data theft operations, and the long shadow of the U.S.-Israeli Stuxnet worm that sabotaged Iran’s nuclear centrifuges.

So far, the effects of cyber war have looked less like World War III and more like chaos at scale—costly, disorienting, but survivable. Even Russia’s most destructive attack, NotPetya, caused billions in damage but didn’t change the political balance in Ukraine. As Galen puts it, cyber remains an intelligence game: useful for spying and disruption, but not yet for victory.

Still, the tools keep getting sharper. AI systems can now find vulnerabilities faster than humans can patch them. Quantum computing, if it delivers on its promise, could one day shatter encryption altogether. When that happens, the line between security failure and strategic collapse could get very thin.

For now, the internet is still running. But the outage was a warning. Complexity breeds fragility. And in a world where code runs everything, a single update can turn Monday into the day the lights go out.

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After two years of catastrophic war in Gaza, the guns are finally—maybe—falling silent.

This week, Trump announced what he’s calling a historic ceasefire between Israel and Hamas: a 20-point plan featuring hostage exchanges, Israeli withdrawals from parts of Gaza, and an “international peace board” led by Trump himself and Tony Blair. Yes, that Tony Blair.

If it holds, it will be the first sustained pause in fighting since 2023. But as we break down in this episode, almost every piece of the deal looks fragile. Israel’s cabinet barely approved it. Hamas has no intention of disarming. And the details of who actually governs Gaza—Arab peacekeepers, Israeli forces, or the Trump-Blair board—are a blur.

Beneath the headlines lies a deeper question: what comes next?

* If Hamas keeps its weapons, Israel won’t withdraw.

* If Israel stays, the fighting resumes.

* If Gaza falls under an “international mandate,” whose interests will it serve?

Even if the ceasefire holds, both hosts argue the long-term political picture is grim. Israel’s leadership and population seem uninterested in a viable peace process. The Palestinian factions are divided and decimated. And the United States—the only power capable of imposing a real settlement (maybe)—appears unwilling to try.

As Galen puts it, “This isn’t a peace deal. It’s a timeout.”

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What if the 20th century’s three great struggles—World War I, World War II, and the Cold War—were all really about the same thing?

That’s the argument in Hal Brands’ new book The Eurasian Century, which we dig into this week. Brands traces the warnings of early geopoliticians like Halford Mackinder and Alfred Thayer Mahan: never let a single power dominate Eurasia. History, he argues, proved them right. Germany tried twice. The Soviet Union tried once. Each time, the United States eventually intervened—and each time, the global balance of power was at stake.

Today, in this book, Brands warns of a “second Eurasian century”, with China rising, Russia aligned, and the U.S. at risk of pulling back just as the stakes are highest. He frames the coming decades as Cold War II, and argues that containment, primacy, and forward defense are the only viable American responses.

We push back on some of this. Was German hegemony ever really possible in World War I? Could the Soviets have rolled Western Europe? And is it really impossible for the U.S. to strike political accommodations with autocracies? History suggests otherwise.

Still, the book is a sharp reminder that geography, power, and politics don’t go away. Whether Washington chooses confrontation, accommodation, or hemispheric defense, the consequences will shape the 21st century—just as they did the last one.

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Remember when Barack Obama stood in Prague in 2009 and called for a world without nuclear weapons? That feels like another planet.

Today, the United States faces an aggressive nuclear peer in Russia, with another antagonist racing towards full peer status in China—while North Korea and others expand their arsenals on the margins. The assumptions that guided policy for decades—stable deterrence, manageable arms control, a world where nukes fade into the background—no longer hold.

We sat down with Brendan Green, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati and author of The Revolution That Failed: Nuclear Competition, Arms Control, and the Cold War, to unpack what this means.

Some highlights:

* China’s buildup: Beijing is no longer content with a “minimum deterrent.” It’s building a triad to match the U.S. and Russia.

* Russia’s unraveling: Relations are at rock bottom, arms control is dead, and Moscow is leaning on nuclear threats to manage its conventional weakness.

* MAD under pressure: Mutually assured destruction once promised stability. But advances in counterforce, missile defense, and command-and-control raise doubts about whether MAD still holds.

* Allies on edge: If Washington can’t credibly guarantee protection, partners like South Korea, Japan, and Germany may rethink their own nuclear options.

The upshot: nuclear weapons are back at the center of world politics. The U.S. may not need to double its arsenal, but “relatively modest adjustments” in posture—new theater options, modernized warheads, and credible damage-limiting capabilities—could decide whether deterrence holds in the coming decade.

As Green puts it, arms racing isn’t just about warheads. It’s about politics, reassurance, and the credibility of America’s commitments. And in this “new nuclear age,” credibility is what counts.

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Nineteen Russian drones crossed into Polish territory this week, triggering a scramble of jets, the shutdown of airspace over the country’s east, and one drone crashing through the roof of a civilian home. No casualties, no explosions—but Warsaw was rattled enough to invoke Article 4 of the NATO treaty, calling for urgent alliance consultations. That’s only the eighth such invocation in NATO’s 75-year history.

Moscow insists the drones were misdirected by Ukrainian jamming. Poland and its neighbors aren’t buying it. They see a deliberate probe: gray zone tactics, the kind designed to test NATO’s “every inch” security guarantee without tripping Article 5.

Why now? Several possible signals overlap:

* To NATO: your defenses are thin, and your promises aren’t ironclad.

* To Belarus: don’t get ideas about cutting a deal with the West.

* To Trump: Russia retains escalation cards outside Ukraine, and can play them at will.

The immediate NATO response looks modest—some European jets and ships, not much more. Without U.S. weight, the symbolism is greater than the military effect. But that symbolism cuts both ways. If Russia can steadily erode NATO’s credibility with low-cost drones, credibility itself is what’s in play.

It won’t spark World War III. But history suggests that the real danger is not in the provocation, but in the miscalculation that might follow.

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We’ve seen enough to believe that the Xi Jinping - Vladimir Putin bromance has staying power. Heads of state (even neighboring ones like Russia and China) simply don’t officially visit with one another with the frequency these two have since Xi rose to power in 2012. Further, strongmen tend to eschew friends, much preferring toadies, supplicants and sycophants. The relationship must be real.

The dictators — recently seen side by side at China’s 80th Victory Day parade celebrating Allied victory in WW2 — have bonded over a shared affinity for absolute personal power, as well as a burning hatred of how the United States has managed the world since the end of the Cold War.

To that end, they declared a “No Limits” partnership in early 2022, just a few weeks before Russia turned global security (and Chinese foreign policy) inside-out by invading Ukraine. It’s not clear that Putin warned Xi beforehand, but that’s all water under the bridge: China is underwriting Russia’s war and keeping its economy afloat, hoping to keep the West pinned down there to gain a freer hand in Asia.

The relationship, which appears to be going swimmingly, is more troubled than it seems, however. These two countries have been at odds far longer than they’ve cooperated. Without a mutual enemy in the form of the U.S., those old cracks could resurface in a hurry…

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