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.

Recent Posts

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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Escaping the Keynes Versus Neoliberalism Trap

Escaping the Keynes Versus Neoliberalism Trap

by | 17 March, 2022 | ,

This piece is the third of a three-part series grappling with the role of political economy in making a just, sustainable international order. Neoliberalism — the ideology of the primacy of capital — has been bad for American statecraft. It’s a major reason why we have no economic strategy. And I’m totally a get-out-of-neoliberalism stan. But where we go from here matters.  The new post-liberal right, for example, also hates neoliberalism, but of course it wants to take us into a future that looks something like the Handmaids Tale. Democrats, on the other hand, see...

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