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 with Yale University Press titled Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace.

Recent Posts

Nuclear Precarity and the Russia Crisis

Nuclear Precarity and the Russia Crisis

by | 6 October, 2022 | ,

Everybody’s talking about nuclear war with Russia right now and it bugs me, not least because I’ve seen this nuclear frenzy before. Now, I think people have good reason to be worried about Russian nuclear use, as I wrote some five months ago.  But what gets me about “the discourse” is that a tremendous amount of it is ahistorical. On the one hand, the conversation is weighted down with the opinions of people with large social media followings but no—zero—knowledge about nuclear weapons or coercion theory. On the other hand, a good percentage of people who actually do know...

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Making Sense of “Rules-Based” Anti-Liberalism

Making Sense of “Rules-Based” Anti-Liberalism

by | 26 September, 2022 | , ,

Dozens of regimes around the world are anti-liberal—autocratic to varying degrees—but also big fans of a "rules-based" international order, which for the past 50 years or so has been a neoliberal economic order. Not a coincidence. The reason an anti-liberal might also be a neoliberal seems rather obvious: Because they're kleptocrats and oligarchs who are getting paid! A regime doesn't need to embrace democracy in any meaningful sense in order to be a productive part of global capitalism. To the contrary, systematically suppressing collective and individual rights is a...

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Antagonistic Trust, Asian Insecurity, and “Strategic” Competition

Antagonistic Trust, Asian Insecurity, and “Strategic” Competition

by | 18 September, 2022 | ,

I was on a refreshingly contrarian panel recently as part of Victoria Forum, this big shindig in Canada (at University of Victoria in British Columbia, not to be confused with Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, where I teach). The topic was “Trust-Building in Asia in an Era of Great Power Competition.”  Unlike most panels on “great power competition,” and I've been on a few, this one didn’t have anyone cheerleading for a new Cold War. Everyone had their own version of skepticism about “great power competition” as a meaningful framework. You can watch the panel below. My...

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To Fear or Love Multipolarity?

To Fear or Love Multipolarity?

by | 13 August, 2022 | , ,

The global distribution of material power changes from time to time. It’s something that happens, not something we should spend any amount of time pursuing or avoiding. I say this as someone who thinks the United States has done questionable good and much unquestionable harm with its former status as a unipolar power, so this is not a proxy argument about US foreign policy.   You might be wondering who wants multipolarity, and the answer is lots of folks.  Most versions of the coalition favoring foreign policy restraint implicitly seek a multipolar world....

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