For today’s show, Thursday host Allen Ruff is joined by historian Alfred McCoy, who shares his broader global perspectives on the war in Ukraine.

They spend the hour discussing his essay “What Difference Does a War Make? The Geopolitics of the New Cold War” and the geopolitical factors of this war that go beyond a narrow focus on Vladimir Putin.

Alfred McCoy is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he teaches and researches modern Philippine social and political history, U.S. foreign policy, colonial empires in Southeast Asia, global illicit drug trafficking, and CIA covert operations. He is the author of many books, most recently In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Haymarket, 2017) and To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change (Haymarket, 2021).

Cover image: Map of 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine by Homoatrox, shared under public domain

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