nationalism

The Cruel, Conceited Follies of Trump’s Foreign Policy: 2026 Edition

Zachary Woodman Culture, Current Events, Law, Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
A neo-expressionist painting of Trump jamming an American Flag into the Globe with "Yours Win Ours" written in blood in the background, a bald eagle, and pastiches of factories and oil refineries.

Trump has now taken extralegal military action in Venezuela. Trump is strongly considering such action in Iran. And Trump keeps flirting with aggressive globally destabilizing military annexation of Greenland, a NATO ally. Many people are acting perplexed. After all, didn’t libertarian “genius” and totally-not-delusional-reactionary Walter Block tell us back in 2016 that libertarians should vote for Trump because he is anti-war? After this proved to be false the first term, didn’t totally-not-delusional-reactionary Walter Block then tell us again case for libertarianism was that he was anti-war and anti-foreign intervention, and that he was super cereal this time?

Sarcasm aside, I think it is worth revisiting why Trump’s foreign policy turn towards a radical sort of imperialist interventionism is so evil and unsurprising. I was confident back in 2016 that he was always going to be an old-school imperialist who uses US military conquest purely for resource extraction in a way that would be far worse than neocon warmongering. I wrote at the time, following Zach Beauchamp (who continues to emphasize this point), that Trump’s foreign policy was neither the neo-conservative interventionism of the Clintons and Bushes of the world, nor the principled anti-interventionism of libertarian scholars like Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall, nor even the nationalist isolationism of paleoconservatives like James Buchanan. Instead, Trump’s foreign policy has always (quite consistently, since he was still a pro-choice democrat in the 90s) been about advancing inchoate national economic and political interests—which really just means the interests of the politically connected.

This connection between Trump’s completely crankish economic nationalism and his imperialist foreign policy is even tighter now than it was then. It seems Trump is likely facing a rejection of his unconstitutional overreach of unilaterally applying economically suicidal tariffs from SCOTUS. The tariffs, which originally, might I add, were based on perhaps the single dumbest attempt to do economics I have ever seen, appeared to be lifted straight from ChatGPT, given that his main economic advisor on these matters, Peter Navarro, is literally a fraudster. As a result, he now seems to be manufacturing a national security crisis so he can impose tariffs without congress’ blessing.

But I do not want to revisit Trump’s imperialist foreign policy just to gloat. I also want to revisit and restate why this foreign policy is unbelievably unjust and self-destructive. What I wrote back in 2016 is still worth reposting at length:

First, Trump’s style of Jacksonian foreign policy is largely responsible for most of the humanitarian atrocities committed by the American government. Second, Trump’s economic foreign policy is antithetical to the entire spirit of the liberal tradition; it undermines the dignity and freedom of the individual and instead treats the highest good as for the all-powerful nation-state (meaning mostly the politicians and their special interests) as the end of foreign policy, rather than peace and liberty. Finally, Trump’s foreign policy fails for the same reasons that socialism fails. If the goals of foreign policy are to represent “national interest,” then the policymaker must know what that “national interest” even is and we have little reason to think that is the case, akin to the knowledge problem in economic coordination.

… This is because the Jacksonian view dictates that we should use full force in war to advance our interests and the reasons for waging war are for selfish rather than humanitarian purposes. We have good reason to think human rights under Trump will be abused to an alarming degree, as his comments that we should “bomb the hell out of” Syria, kill the noncombatant families of suspected terrorists, and torture detainees indicate. Trump is literally calling for the US to commit inhumane war crimes in the campaign, it is daunting to think just how dark his foreign policy could get in practice.

To reiterate: Trump’s foreign policy views are just a particularly nasty version of imperialism and colonialism. Mises dedicated two entire sections of his chapter on foreign policy in Liberalism: The Classical Tradition to critiquing colonialism and revealing just how contrary these views are to liberalism’s commitment to peace and liberty. In direct opposition to Trump’s assertions that we should go to war to gain another country’s wealth and resources and that we should expand military spending greatly, Mises argues:

“Wealth cannot be won by the annexation of new provinces since the “revenue” deprived from a territory must be used to defray the necessary costs of its administration. For a liberal state, which entertains no aggressive plans, a strengthening of its military power is unimportant.”

Mises’ comments on the colonial policy in his time are extremely pertinent considering Trump’s calls to wage ruthlessly violent wars and commit humanitarian crises. “No chapter of history is steeped further in blood than the history of colonialism,” Mises argued. “Blood was shed uselessly and senselessly. Flourishing lands were laid waste; whole peoples destroyed and exterminated. All this can in no way be extenuated or justified.”

Trump says the ends of foreign policy are to aggressively promote “our” national interests, Mises says “[t]he goal of the domestic policy of liberalism is the same as that of its foreign policy: peace.” Trump views the world as nations competing in a zero-sum game and there must be one winner that can only be brought about through military conquest and economic protectionism, Mises says liberalism “aims at the peaceful cooperation between nations as within each nation” and specifically attacks “chauvinistic nationalists” who “maintain that irreconcilable conflicts of interest exist among the various nations[.]” Trump is rabidly opposed to free trade and is horrifically xenophobic on immigration, the cornerstone of Mises’ foreign policy is free movement of capital and labor over borders. There is no “congruence” between Trump and any classically liberal view on foreign policy matters in any sense; to argue otherwise is to argue from a position of ignorance, delusion, or to abandon the very spirit of classical liberalism in the first place.

…Additionally, even if we take Trump’s nationalist ends as given, the policy means Trump prefers of violent military intervention likely will not be successful for similar reasons to why socialism fails. Christopher Coyne has argued convincingly that many foreign interventions in general fail for very similar reasons to why attempts at economic intervention fail, complications pertaining to the Hayekian knowledge problem. How can a government ill-equipped to solve the economic problems of domestic policy design and control the political institutions and culture of nations abroad?  Coyne mainly has the interventionism of neoconservatives and liberals in mind, but many of his insights apply just as well to Trump’s Jacksonian vision for foreign policy.

The knowledge problem also applies on another level to Trump’s brand of interventionism. Trump assumes that he, in all his wisdom as president, can know what the “national interest” of the American people actually is, just like socialist central planners assume they know the underlying value scales or utility functions of consumers in society. We have little reason to assume this is the case.

Let’s take a more concrete example: Trump seems to think one example of intervention in the name of national interest is to take the resource of another country that our country needs, most commonly oil. However, how is he supposed to know which resources need to be pillaged for the national interest? There’s a fundamental calculation problem here. A government acting without a profit signal cannot know the answer to such a problem and lacks the incentive to properly answer it in the first place as the consequences failure falls upon the taxpayers, not the policy makers. Even if Trump and his advisors could figure out that the US needs a resource, like oil, and successfully loots it from another country, like Libya, there is always the possibility that this artificial influx of resources, this crony capitalist welfare for one resource at the expense of others, is crowding out potentially more efficient substitutes.

For an example, if the government through foreign policy expands the supply of oil, this may stifle entrepreneurial innovations for potentially more efficient resources in certain applications, such as natural gas, solar, wind, or nuclear in energy, for the same reasons artificially subsidizing these industries domestically stifle innovation. They artificially reduce the relative scarcity of the favored resource, reducing the incentive for entrepreneurs to find innovative means of using other resources or more efficient production methods. At the very least, Trump and his advisors would have little clue how to judge the opportunity cost of pillaging various resources and so would not know how much oil to steal from Libya. Even ignoring all those problems, it’s very probable that it would be cheaper and morally superior to simply peaceably trade with another country for oil (or any other resource) rather than waging a costly, violent, inhumane war in the first place.

Having said all that, there is plenty I got wrong in picturing Trump as an old-school imperialist. During Trump’s first term, I underestimated the extent to which institutional constraints would stop him from acting on his worst nationalist and imperialist impulses. But this term, those constraints are gone. The Mattises, Tillersons, Boltons, and Pences of the world have been replaced with the Vances, Noems, Rubios, and Hegseths. As a result, thinking of Trump as an old-school imperialist and nationalist is becoming more accurate since he is allowed to act on his irrational, deranged impulses.

Second, I failed to distinguish sufficiently between resource extraction through indirect means of violent regime change, tariffs, weapons supply, and 19th-century colonialist-style direct annexation versions of it. I do still think that if Trump really did what he most consistently wants he would do quite a bit of annexation and old school colonialism (see his comments on Greenland and Canada), but he seems a bit more content than I projected back then to use military force to install stooges and puppet regimes for resource extraction (as he has sought to do in both Gaza and now Venezuela). Which, to your point, is not as different from the Nixon/Bush/Clinton/Reagan type intervention as reactionary centrists would have you believe, but the nakedness of the extractive nationalist motivation does mark a difference that encourages even more brazenly cruel, more illegal, and more strategically incoherent and unpredictable interventionist warmongering.

Thirdly, and most obviously, I greatly overestimated his coherence on foreign policy. Whether it is him handicapping US influence in the Pacific by withdrawing from the TPP while implementing tariffs on Chinese goods to seem tough in the first term, which just gave China more leverage in the region. Or whether it’s his delusional flip-flopping on Russia and Ukraine based on who he talked to last, constantly this term. Or whether it’shis random provocation against Iran in 2019 by killing one of their generals. Or whether it’s his insane flip-flopping between Nuclear War talk and sychophancy with North Korea. Or the total randomness of his attacking Venezuela for more domestic than foreign policy reasons now. He is simply far more impulsive and deranged than I would have predicted in 2016. This part of that old article seems especially stale now:

After all, it doesn’t matter so much the character of public officials as the institutional incentives they face. But in matters of foreign policy problems of temperament and character do matter because the social situation between foreign leaders in diplomacy can often make a huge difference.

I did hedge that by allowing that Trump may be a uniquely unfit person so as to constitute a sui-generis case. But I should have been more emphatic about that: Trump really is a uniquely world-historically dangerous monster, and he has gotten more and more incoherent and impulsive over the years with his cognitive decline.

Finally, the biggest miss in my analysis of Trump’s foreign policy back then is that I put far too much emphasis on Trump’s focus on material goods, thinking he really just thought of geopolitics like a 12-year-old approaches a turn-based strategy game like Risk in just accruing more stuff. But in reality, his approach is far more disturbing and vile than even that. It is not simply about getting oil for US oil companies. In the case of Venezuela, oil execs do not seem so gun-ho. As one private equity investor told the Financial Times last week, “No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country.” Indeed, the political risk is so big there Exonn’s CEO has called Venezuela “uninvestable” and Trump is trying to force oil companies to misallocate capital to Venezuela.

Narrow left-wing materialists’ critiques like mine misfire because they treat material resources as the main thing. It is not the oil per se that Trump wants, but what the oil represents. He is instead approaching international geo-politics like an 8-year-old driven by malignant narcissism: he wants symbols of nationalist masculine domination. Indeed, when asked why he wanted Greenland, Trump was quoted as saying:

Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.

Indeed, the fact that Greenland looks big on a Mercator projection of the earth has as much to do with why Trump wants it as the oil. As Trump continues his authoritarian assaults on individual liberty domestically and pursues semiotic nationalist domination internationally, one can only vainly pray that something keeps his dark, demonic, twisted sadist fantasies in check without devolving into a true civilization-level threat.

The Cruel, Conceited Follies of Trump’s Foreign Policy: 2026 Edition

Africa’s quest for sovereignty

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History , , , , , ,

That’s the title of this excellent piece by Toby Green, a historian at King’s College London. Green does a wonderful job of highlighting all of the problems that African societies face today: corruption, poverty, and my personal favorite, “neoliberalism.” Neoliberalism is just shorthand for loans that Western financial institutions give to African states. These loans are usually only given if African states promise to follow certain guidelines that Western financial institutions have drawn up. The end result is corruption and poverty.

I can agree that it’s a terrible system, even if I think the name Green has given it is dumb.

Throughout the piece, Green makes a good case for fundamental change in Africa. The problem is that he mistakenly thinks that this change can occur via the states that are currently in place in Africa. He mistakenly thinks that Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, or Angola, to name some of the more prominent examples, have what it takes to enact the changes necessary for a fundamental shift.

Green argues that “unipolar American and Western European hegemony” (which by definition cannot be unipolar if there’s two poles, unless…) is responsible for Africa’s problems, and that the continent’s early independence leaders should be looked to for guidance. The problem with this, as Hendrik Spruyt has pointed out, is that the continent’s early independence leaders didn’t listen to anybody but themselves. They simply sought to graft their visions of what Africa should be onto the existing colonial governance system of the various European powers.

These early independence leaders sought to forge nations out of the colonies that the Europeans had haphazardly patched together. There were other elites on the African continent who wanted something different from what Africa’s early independence leaders wanted. Some of these elites were nationalists who wanted their states to be fully recognized equals on the world stage, just like the early independence leaders. The difference between these nationalists, and the early independence leaders, was that they wanted to abolish colonial boundaries and restore pre-colonial boundaries which would then be recognized as states within the Westphalian states-system. Like so:

Early Independence LeadersOther, actual Nationalists
Wanted African states to inherit colonial boundariesWanted African states to abolish colonial boundaries and restore old ones to prominence
Wanted to create and forge national identities out of these colonial boundariesWanted to harness the power of already-existing national identities by tying them to internationally-recognized states

The early independence leaders obviously won out. The borders of European colonialism were maintained and enshrined within the Westphalian states-system that soon encompassed the globe.

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Green and other Leftists think that the above column on the left is a perfectly acceptable way to continue, and that the problem is not the states-system that Africa’s early independence leaders established, but rather the “unipolar hegemony of America and Europe.” Without a rethink of the fundamentals, Green and other Leftists are going to continue inadvertently contributing to the immiseration of Africa.

Don’t get me wrong! The current loan system is awful. It’s terrible. But it’s exactly what you’d expect to get from an order like the one outlined above.

If people are serious about unleashing Africa then they need to look to the above column on the right. The map of the nations that were ignored by Africa’s early independence leaders (ignored, and eventually slaughtered, oppressed, persecuted, and imprisoned) is still there. You can find good maps of nations in Africa — often condescendingly referred to as “ethnic groups” rather than nations – that are superimposed on the map of African postcolonial states. Here’s the best one in the world at the moment.

Green implicitly recognizes that there’s something wrong with the postcolonial African state of Africa’s early independence leaders. He can tell that the column on the left is somehow off:

[…] in many African countries, traditional chiefs [are] more respected than elected officials […] A more damning indictment of the failings of the democratic model promoted across Africa […] is hard to find.

What he can’t seem to do is see that the column on the right lines up almost perfectly with the views that Africans have of their chiefs. Now, the chiefs are by no means revered by everybody in Africa, and there is a strong, if minute, anti-chief current throughout the continent because not everybody wants an Africa based on the tenets of nationalism. The columns above only highlight two strains of thought on how Africa should be governed. There are others, most notably Islamist proposals, but the one that libertarians (and, indeed, most Leftists) should find most attractive is that of the African federalists.

African federalists competed with the two nationalist camps when it became apparent that things were about to change vis-à-vis Africa’s relationship with Europe. While the nationalists embraced decolonization, which meant independence from European colonial rule, the federalists embraced integration with their colonizers. They argued that African colonies could, and should, federate with European countries. This federation would mean that African provinces would stand on equal footing with older provinces of European states. African provinces would be able to practice self-government without resorting to autarky. Like so:

Early Independence LeadersOther, actual NationalistsFederalists
Wanted African states to inherit colonial boundariesWanted African states to abolish colonial boundaries and restore old ones to prominenceWanted African colonies to become represented provinces in federated European polities
Wanted to create and forge national identities out of these colonial boundariesWanted to harness the power of already-existing national identities by tying them to internationally-recognized statesWanted full citizenship rights within the federated polities that would replace the old European empires

In hindsight, the federalists were right to deplore the idea of independence from Europe. The Westphalian nation-state, at least as it was envisioned by Africa’s early independence leaders, has been a disaster for Africa. It’s also clear that the federalists had an uphill climb, not only because decolonization-nationalism were all the rage but also because several of the Europeans who ran the colonies did not themselves have federated orders. The French and Portuguese had no experience with federalism, and the Spanish and British had weird federalisms based on monarchical principles. The Dutch and the Americans both had good models to emulate, but they didn’t have any African colonies and the idea of African colonies federating with Dutch or American states was out of the question in the 1960s and 1970s. That doesn’t have to be the case for today.

There’s nothing in this world that says the ideas of Africa’s federalists can’t be put in to practice today. There’s nothing to prevent the world’s most powerful polity, the compound republic of the United States, from entertaining the ideas put forth by Africa’s federalists. Nothing, that is, except the conservatism of Western and Western-educated elites, who believe that Africa’s early independence leaders were somehow right, because even though the results of their actions have gone horribly wrong, their ideals were pure in motive.

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Sovereign territory and decolonization movements

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History , , , , ,

But while adopting sovereign territoriality as the dominant script, they were far more cautious in accepting the principle of self-determination for all nationalist claims. While claiming the right of national self-determination as a rhetorical tool in the struggle with the metropolitan powers, they simultaneously denied those claims to indigenous groups within the territorial state that the nationalist leaders envisioned. The Dutch were not incorrect in asserting that the nationalist (Javanese) claim for Indonesian independence subverted the possible independence of many areas and ethnic groups within the East Indies. Sukarno himself of course recognized that “the Dutch had invented Indonesia” given that it had never been a coherent political entity before. [Sukarno] was eager to lay claim to the entire territory as a unified state on the principle of sovereign equality with other states, disregarding local demands for true national self-determination.

This is from the great Hendrik Spruyt, and you can read the whole thing (pdf) here.

I have two takeaways for NOL: first, the people who led decolonization efforts after WWII exploited the maps drawn up by imperial powers; they were not nationalists, they were cosmopolitans who had been educated in European capitals and who had borrowed the logic of nationalists in those capitals. Calls for federation instead of independence/decolonization were few and far between, but they did exist. Adam Smith called for union between the UK and its North American colonies. Several African statesmen called for federation between their lands and France. I believe some Indians called for federation between their land (which included present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) and the UK, but I need to do more research on this. In Hawaii, the federalists actually won out.

Second, the current narrative, or script as Spruyt calls it, still doesn’t give local/indigenous actors their due. The current Westphalian script — undergirded by the principle of sovereign equality with other states – still treats the leaders of decolonization like victims of imperialism who fought against the odds to defeat intransigent European oppression. There is simply not much being said about the people who called for greater representation within the European imperiums and for federal restructuring of these imperiums.

A third takeaway is that libertarians have a much better alternative to adopt than shallow anti-imperialism, which is just a form of antiwar nationalism: they could call for federation with polities as a foreign policy doctrine. They could actively build alliances with those factions that were squashed by nationalists who disregarded the claims of other groups, with the aim of integrating these societies into a federal order.

Some Monday Links

Michalis Trepas Links , , , , , ,

Cowboy progressives (Aeon)

Gramsci’s Gift (Boston Review)

A Country of Their Own (Foreign Affairs)

America has captured France (UnHerd)

Why 1980s Oxford holds the key to Britain’s ruling class (Financial Times)

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. “Republican political theories and institutions differed sharply from modern theories and models of international relations. Consequently, the history of international politics, the European system of states and state-formation must be re-conceptualized more in line with historical realities.” (pdf)
  2. The double life of Adam Smith Kwok Ping Tsang, AdamSmithWorks
  3. War at the end of history (Ukraine) Adam Tooze, New Statesman
  4. Taking nationalism seriously (Ukraine) Eteri Tsintsadze-Maass, Duck of Minerva

Immigration in the Time of Joe Biden: What to Do (Part 4 of 11)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , ,

The Nation-State and Borders

Nation-states have to possess immigration policies or they cease to exist. I mean any number of things by “cease to exist,” including falling apart organizationally and economically, to the point of being unable to provide a minimum degree of order, of predictability. (This last sentence might rub pure libertarians the wrong way. I am willing and eager to engage them on the topic of nation-states, societies, and social order.) This failure to function can be the result of an influx of large numbers of immigrants unable to provide for themselves, obviously. I am not suggesting that this is the only possible cause. It’s one cause and it’s staring us in the eyes as I write (April 2021, three and half months into the Biden presidency).

More prosaically, but also a little mysteriously, “cease to exist” may simply refers to the nation-state becoming something else, subjectively less desirable than what it was. The insulting word “nativism” does not do justice to the complex and subtle issues involved here.

Right now, for example, many French people believe that the large presence in their midst of un-assimilated Muslim immigrants endangers the fundamental building blocks of their society’s ethics and laws. These would include, for example, the separation of church and state (of religion and government) and the equality of men and women. Many French people who are not “white supremacists,” (or, more pertinently perhaps, not Christian supremacists) are calling for an end to all Muslim immigration. (Note that I have said nothing about whether I believe their fears are justified.)*

Guarded national borders have been the conventional way to protect the nation-state since the mid-19th century. They don’t have to be but other available methods are even less palatable to those who love freedom. If, for example, every resident of the US carried a personally identified GPS that it is illegal to turn off, it would be easy to monitor the totality of the population. Those moving about without an authorized GPS would stand out. Legal immigrants might be given a GPS with a different signal. Legal visitors who are not immigrants would get yet another with a signal set to come off on or just before their visa expiration. Illegal immigrants would carry no authorized GPS. This absence would designate them the attention of immigration authorities. (Of course, fake GPS would soon be for sale but they would be more difficult to create than are current SS card and other such paper or plastic documents.) And, thinking about it, a microchip painlessly implanted under each person’s skin might work even better! See what I mean about guarded borders not being so repugnant after all?

*The French left-wing media do not offer substantive arguments to calm the widespread alarm raised by the center, by the right, by many others. Instead, they try to make the alarmed feel guilty of “Islamophobia,” supposedly a close cousin of racism. This accusation quickly losses forces because many people realize that Islam is a set of beliefs and of values that Muslims are free to abandon, unlike race. At least, they may abandon it in the French legal context. (In several Muslim countries, such “apostasy” is theoretically punished by death.) By the way, a month before this writing, I talked on a Santa Cruz beach with a pleasant young French Muslim, a pure product of French public schools born in France. He told me calmly that he believed French law should forbid blasphemy.

With all the agitation and all the negative emotions, people with Muslim names appear well represented at all levels and in all sectors of French society. (Firm numbers are hard to come by because the French government does not allow its various branches to collect information on religious affiliation nor on ethnicity.) And, by the way, I just love what Arabic influence has done to French popular music and songs.

[Editor’s note: this is Part 4 of an 11-part essay. You can read Part 3 here, or read the essay in its entirety here.]

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Sweet Home Hialeah César Baldelomar, Commonweal
  2. The totalitarianism of origins Tal Fortgang, Law & Liberty
  3. Moralism, nationalism, and identity politics Andrew J Cohen, RCL
  4. A practical approach to legal-pluralist anarchism Jason Morgan, JLS

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Middle class: questioning the definitions Mary Lucia Darst, NOL
  2. On Romney’s child allowance proposal Scott Sumner, EconLog
  3. On the American constitutionalism, and nationalism Dennis Coyle, Modern Age
  4. Ottomanism, nationalism, and republicanism (IV) Barry Stocker, NOL

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Islamic State has stopped talking about China Elliot Stewart, War on the Rocks
  2. Can we see past the myth of the Himalaya? Akash Kapur, New Yorker
  3. Nation-building or state-making? (pdf) Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, Contemporary South Asia
  4. On national liberation Murray Rothbard, Libertarian Forum

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. The Protestant ethic and the spirit of…nationalism? Wohnsiedler, et al, VOXEU
  2. Protestantism and the rise of capitalism (pdf) Delacroix & Nielsen, Social Forces
  3. America’s debt to Swiss intellectuals Bradford Littlejohn, Modern Age
  4. Up from colonialism Helen Andrew, Claremont Review of Books

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. How slaves shape their societies Catherine Cameron, Aeon
  2. Geopolitics and change (pdf) Daniel Deudney, New Thinking in IR
  3. Bernie Sanders?
  4. Liberalizing the liberal order? (podcast) David Hendrickson, Power Problems

The politics of The Expanse

Brandon Christensen Culture, Politics , , , ,

I am rewatching The Expanse, which is a deservedly popular science fiction show on Amazon Prime. It’s very good. As I said, I am rewatching it, mostly in anticipation of the new season, which comes out next month.

It’s good because I like my science fiction to be science-y. I prefer realistic scenarios. So Star Wars is not really my thing (even Star Trek is a stretch, to be honest, but DS9 is amazing).

One thing that strikes me as wrong in The Expanse is the politics. In the storyline, there are three political units: Earth, Mars, and the Belt. Earth and Mars are sovereign, and the Belt (based out of the asteroid belt) is semi-sovereign with a distinct and viable “nationalist” movement there. This is a sophisticated storyline for television. It’s better than DS9, which bore the standard for great science fiction television until The Expanse came along.

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But I can’t stop thinking: why would the political alignment of the solar system be based on planets? If it were to be truly realistic, then Earth would not be a sovereign political unit. Instead, we’d have a dozen or so political units from Earth, some political units from Mars, and several from the Belt. Factions in the form of sovereign political units would dominate the political landscape, not planets.

Now, The Expanse does a good job confronting the issue of faction. Earth’s democratically-elected dictator has to deal with several factions, and Mars and the Belt both have factions, too. And several excellent subplots deal significantly with the issue of faction. But there’s not enough sovereignties in The Expanse. It doesn’t mean the series isn’t the best science fiction television series of all time (it is), but it does leave me wanting more.

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Sovereignty and the modern treaty process (pdf) Paul Nadasdy, CSSH
  2. How states wrest territory from their adversaries (pdf) Dan Altman, ISQ
  3. Farage’s dangerous appeal Chris Dillow, Stumbling & Mumbling
  4. Decomposing the nation-state (pdf) Murray Rothbard, JLS

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. All ideologies eventually seem to fail Scott Sumner, EconLog
  2. State capacity libertarianism as a pipe dream Jason Brennan, 200-Proof Liberals
  3. China after Covid Wang Xiuying, London Review of Books
  4. Nationalism, Eastern European style James Felak, Law & Liberty

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. The state of African literature Saint & Shringarpure, Africa is a Country
  2. Du passé faisons table rase Branko Milanovic, globalinequality
  3. Roger Taney’s statue (Dred Scott) Damon Root, Reason
  4. The Ottoman Empire and its Arab nationalists Christopher Clark, New Statesman