Book Talk: The Rivalry Peril
As the utopian “end of history” turned progressively more dystopian through US wars of aggression, financial turmoil from unregulated markets, and popular discontent with the failure of democratic forms, the US foreign policy establishment turned to “competition” with China as a unified response to their own crisis of legitimacy.
In The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy, Van Jackson, senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington, and Michael Brenes, co-director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and lecturer in history at Yale University, argue that, far from saving democracy and American leadership, the turn to great power conflict poses grave dangers to both. Jake Werner, director of the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute, joined the authors to discuss the book and where US policy toward China might be headed under Trump.
Program
Countries/Territories
Entities
Panelists
Van Jackson
Van Jackson joined Victoria University of Wellington in 2017 as a senior lecturer in International Relations. He is also a senior research scholar at Security in Context, where he co-directs its "Multipolarity, Great-Power Competition, and the Global South" project. Van’s research broadly concerns the class politics of geopolitics, especially the intersections of U.S. foreign policy with East Asian and Pacific international relations. He is the author of dozens of journal articles, book chapters, and policy reports, as well as five books. Prior to joining Victoria, Van taught courses on Asian security, U.S. foreign policy, and Korea and Japan at Georgetown University, Hawaii Pacific University, the Catholic University of America, and the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies.
Michael Brenes
Michael Brenes is co-director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and lecturer in History at Yale University. His research interests include United States foreign policy, political history, and political economy. He is the author of "For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy", published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2020, and the co-editor (with Daniel Bessner) of "Rethinking U.S. Power: Domestic Histories of U.S. Foreign Relations", published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2024. In addition to his academic articles and book chapters, his work has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Politico, Dissent, Boston Review, The Nation, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Jake Werner
Jake Werner is director of the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute. His research examines the emergence of great power conflict between the US and China and develops policies to rebuild constructive economic relations. Prior to joining Quincy, Jake was a Postdoctoral Global China Research Fellow at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago, a Fulbright Scholar at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, and a Fulbright-Hays Fellow at East China Normal University in Shanghai. He received his PhD in history from the University of Chicago.