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

NOW The White House Wants To Fight Kleptocracy

NOW The White House Wants To Fight Kleptocracy

by | 10 December, 2021 | ,

The Biden administration just issued the government’s first ever anti-corruption strategy. The upshot: It’s needed. It’s analytically informed. It raises the prioritization of fighting kleptocracy. The downside: It’s not all that realistic. It defines corruption so widely that it makes prioritization fanciful. And it defers most of the real work to some to-be-determined imaginary future on the other side of Republican authoritarianism.   Eons ago, during the 2020 presidential campaign cycle, anti-corruption was a major theme in the progressive foreign...

read more
Who’s Afraid of China’s Nukes?

Who’s Afraid of China’s Nukes?

by | 22 November, 2021 | , ,

In 1932, John Chamberlain lamented “the unwillingness of the liberal to continue with analysis once the process of analysis had become uncomfortable.”  He was critiquing the way Wilsonian liberals drifted into World War One.  Socialists and reformist progressives had thought seriously about both the causes of the war and the realistic consequences for American democracy if the nation opted in.  Liberals, he charged, couldn’t stomach such analysis and instead idealized the upside of succumbing to war fever.   I think about Chamberlain’s quote...

read more
Want to Start a National Security Think Tank?

Want to Start a National Security Think Tank?

by | 22 October, 2021 | ,

You're going to need some help. Since 2017, when I departed the Beltway in favor of (literally) greener pastures, I've been trying to figure out how to create an institutional presence for alternative (ok, progressive) voices on foreign policy. Why? Although I don't like the "Blob" epithet, there is a lot of consensus thinking in Washington — especially circa 2017 — and it's historically really difficult to promote competing perspectives without your invitation to the cocktail party getting lost in the mail. Worse than that though, I was appalled watching the "ideas industry" line up to...

read more
Fighting Analogies in International Relations

Fighting Analogies in International Relations

by | 12 October, 2021 | , ,

“Kuzushi” is the concept of off-balancing. It refers to a tactic of getting your opponent out of a fixed position where he’ll be vulnerable, maybe getting his weight tilted too much to one side or making him overcommit to a move. With kuzushi, you aren’t achieving anything; you’re opening up a window of opportunity. Window ajar, you have a split second to advance your position. A sweep or submission attempt that would’ve been impossible under normal conditions suddenly works against an unbalanced opponent.

read more