ChinaTalk

What a profound honor to have Paul Kennedy on the ChinaTalk podcast. Kennedy is my favorite living historian and the writer who’s most shaped my intellectual development. His analysis underpins what you hear on this show every week.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is an epochal work that traces global power transitions from 1500 to the present. It’s gripping, forest-and-trees scholarship at its finest.

Equally impressive in different ways is his book, The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860 to 1914. Not only is it god-tier diplomatic history, it also gives you a feel for the era through its explorations of social, economic, domestic, political, and cultural dimensions of Anglo-German relations. There are fascinating US/China analogies that we’ll get into at some point in this podcast.

His two most recent works directly inform the military coverage on China Talk. Engineers of Victory looks at how people and the systems they worked within solved engineering challenges that turned the tide for entire theaters in World War II. His latest, Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of Global Order in World War II, is a sweeping history of a radical transformation in the balance of military power, from the mid-1930s when America was just gaining prominence, to after World War II, when it had no other significant naval competitor.

The Parliament of Man: A History of the United Nations first got me interested in international organizations and gave me my senior thesis topic about the creation of the UN.

What Kennedy taught me more than anything is this: sweat the details, look at the individual players, and zoom out often enough to understand what truly shapes the long-term fate of nations.

Over the course of this episode, we pick up themes from all across his work:


Great Power rivalries of the late 19th-early 20th centuries and their echoes today,


Why potential antagonisms turn nice and why others turn belligerent,


The persistent struggles of liberal internationalists and why they rarely get the outcomes they want,


How China today is not Germany of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,


The surprising ways geography shapes global power dynamics,


How fear spreads among nations and why mutual suspicion is so hard to escape,


Why top powers blow it and lose their dominant place in the world,


How systems and innovation win wars.

And much more, including salutary lessons from the Dutch and Swedes on boring yet prosperous futures, how Churchill’s interest in gadgets influenced the course of the Second World War, and why transformative action from the UN remains unlikely in the near future.

Note: we recorded this in 2024.
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Africa is the literal center of the world’s map and increasingly the center of gravity for ISIS, the manpower source for Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the contested geopolitical ground where China builds bases and drops off free weapons. Our first active-duty guest pulls back the curtain on a combatant command that runs on 0.1% of the defense budget.

LTG John W. Brennan Jr. is Deputy Commander of U.S. Africa Command and a 30-year career Special Forces officer, with command tours spanning 5th Special Forces Group, the anti-ISIS task force in Syria, and 1st Special Forces Command. He’s joined by ChinaTalk’s Justin, who served under Brennan as a young NCO in the Middle East.

We discuss…


How AFRICOM runs a counter-VEO away game on 0.1% of the defense budget by working “by, with, and through” partners


“Putin’s Purse”: trafficking thousands of Africans onto the Ukrainian front lines under false pretenses


The Houthi–al-Shabaab pipeline and the threat triangle around Djibouti’s PRC naval base


Building an “alternate DIB in exile”: drone centers of excellence in Morocco, South African artillery, Namibian satellite radios


Why Brennan wants to “declare jihad against proprietary data streams” and where AI actually helps a combatant commander decide

WarTalk's first Ivorian dance party suno song: https://suno.com/s/1hhJTtwBn2NGR8eT

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Pope Leo has called AI the single greatest challenge facing humanity. Not war, not poverty, not climate change. So we got a panel together to sort out what this encyclical means.

Joining Jordan are Tim Hwang, deputy director of the Institute for Christian Machine Intelligence, John-Clark Levin of Kurzweil Technologies, and ChinaTalk's resident Catholic, Aqib Zakaria.

We discuss…

Why the encyclical's claim that AI cannot truly "understand" is a narrow theological term of art, and why that nuance gets lost on Twitter

Pope Leo's call to "disarm AI" and the Holy See's potential role mediating between the US and China and speaking for the global South

Tim's pitch for a Vatican alignment lab that buys GPUs and tries to beat Anthropic's benchmarks from Christian first principles

Why frontier-lab researchers, including non-believers, are treating the Pope as a moral coordinating signal

How Anthropic drifting from deontology toward virtue ethics in training Claude looks like a validation of the Christian approach

The provocation underneath all of it: is the American AI stack a Christian AI stack?

pope as chicago footwork: https://suno.com/s/1Qb9Ce3Bh6saeF2V
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How do you evaluate an AI model for a war you can only fight once? Ike Harris, a Naval officer turned Hill staffer turned AI policy operator, joins the show to discuss his effort to bridge the gap between the labs that build frontier models and the operators who'll deploy them.

Ike Harris is the executive director of the newly launched Frontier Security Institute, and was most recently the Republican tech lead on the House Select Committee on the CCP, with prior stints in OSD and as a surface warfare officer.

We discuss…


The GAIN AI and Overwatch acts: and Congress's most aggressive attempt to wrest export-control authority from the executive branch since the Cold War


Why you can't just "buy AI": and why national security evals look nothing like the SWE benchmarks the labs optimize for


Strategic-level evals :for problems you can't run ten times, from Iran negotiations to targeting at the COCOM level


China's robot-army advantage: open-weight models at the edge, Ukraine-style drone iteration soaked up via Russia, and a casualty tolerance the US can't match


The "no more NASA" problem: how risk tolerance, mission command, and law-of-armed-conflict constraints shape who wins the deployment race


Breaking into tech policy: Ike's case for why every aspiring policy person should spend a year on the Hill

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How did Arizona lock in billion-dollar investments from TSMC, Intel, and LG Energy?

Ian O’Grady, Senior Policy Advisor to Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, joins ChinaTalk to share war stories from the state that’s successfully reshoring semiconductor and battery production.

Our conversation covers:


Labor Disputes and Crisis Management — How the Governor’s Office mediates disagreements between stakeholders and keeps workers happy.


Clean Air Act vs. chips — Why Arizona’s fabs struggled to get building permits despite the state’s low per-capita emissions.


Arizona’s Abundance Playbook — Including a consolidated commerce authority, a culture of engineering > litigation, and institutional factors that help Arizona outbuild Ohio and Texas.


Taiwanifying the Desert — How Phoenix welcomed TSMC engineers with Mandarin programs in schools, Din Tai Fung, and a new Costco.


Industrial Policy Resource Wars — How Arizona avoids backlash based on power and water use concerns.

Co-hosting is ChinaTalk researcher Aqib Zakaria.

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner

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