The Duck of Minerva

Van Jackson

Van Jackson is a professor of international relations at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and a think tanker at lots of places around the world: a distinguished fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada; a senior associate fellow at the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Nonproliferation & Disarmament (APLN); and the defence & strategy fellow at the Centre for Strategic Studies in New Zealand. He also hosts The Un-Diplomatic Podcast. Before entering academia, Van was a foreign policy practitioner, working as a strategist and policy adviser in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Obama administration and serving in the US Air Force as a Korean linguist and intelligence analyst. He is the author of two books on US-North Korea relations with Cambridge University Press, On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War (2018) and Rival Reputations: Coercion and Credibility in US-North Korea Relations (2016). He has a third book forthcoming with Yale University Press titled Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace.

Van Jackson

Recent Posts

Geopolitical Rivalry: Great for Princes, Bad for Paupers

Geopolitical Rivalry: Great for Princes, Bad for Paupers

by | 17 July, 2022 | , ,

If you’ve spent any amount of time in Washington, there’s a good chance you’ve internalized a rosier narrative of the Cold War than the actual history warrants (I certainly had).  To correct that, I have an essay out in Foreign Affairs with Michael Brenes, arguing that the bipartisan cheerleading for great-power rivalry today is based on a jaundiced reading of Cold War history. The popular image of the Cold War—as a historical moment that brought out America’s productive energies and made us step up our democracy game—has a basis in truth but obscures more than...

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The Real Conservative Foreign Policy Debate

The Real Conservative Foreign Policy Debate

by | 8 June, 2022 | ,

There’s a battle going down inside the Republican party for what conservative foreign policy ought to be. The problem is that stakeholders in the debate are misrepresenting its terms, and journalistic onlookers are misapprehending what’s really going on.   A senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the neoconservative think tank, officially put it on wax that, yes, there’s a debate over conservative foreign policy, but it’s between “internationalists” and “isolationists.”   The way the New York Times tells it, what’s happening within...

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Patriots Eat Nuclear War for Breakfast

Patriots Eat Nuclear War for Breakfast

by | 19 May, 2022 | ,

I am not supposed to be worried about nuclear war with Russia. With North Korea maybe. I am told Kim Jong Un isn’t rational and can’t be trusted, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Or perhaps China. It’s ten feet tall, after all. Never mind that our nuclear arsenal vastly exceeds theirs. But Russia? Nah. Mutually assured destruction, baby. We both have enough nuclear warheads to destroy each other (and the world) several times over. Nuclear war would be MAD. Plus, I have it on good authority that the core insight of the nuclear revolution still...

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Japan’s Strange Golf-Buddy Theory of Deterrence

Japan’s Strange Golf-Buddy Theory of Deterrence

by | 20 April, 2022 | ,

So Japan’s former Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, was very friendly with Donald Trump while he was president. The two leaders even played several rounds of golf when they were both in power, despite Trump’s anti-Asian, anti-alliance (and occasionally anti-Japan) disposition.  Abe was quoted recently explaining himself, noting that “golf was for deterrence.” Abe claimed that other countries wouldn’t attack Japan if he was close enough to Trump that the two played golf together.   This is fascinating because if we take Abe’s words literally, then in most respects his...

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