This is how I view it. There’s going to be a lot of information that we don’t know surrounding the actual cease-fire, and it’s going to take years, if not decades, to develop the whole story based on classified documentation and interviews with people who were there in both the outgoing Biden administration and the incoming Trump administration. So there is a limit to our knowledge here that needs to be acknowledged.

But I think it’s pretty clear that this reveals the degree to which the United States is actually able to shape policy with client states like Israel in a very direct way, and that everything that the Biden administration was saying, or at the very least implying, about the limits of American power was in effect bullshit. This should be something that people should remember going forward: the United States, as the global imperial hegemon, has incredible influence all over the globe, and particularly with its client states.

My guess is that the Trump administration is not going to be any great friend of the Palestinian people, but it was tired of the headlines, of the vicious images, of the bad press that the Israeli actions in Gaza were granting. So the thing to look out for is what Donald Trump is actually going to do with Israeli policy and the Israeli desire to create some form of Greater Israel, particularly in the West Bank, and in what is now northern Israel and southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights.

I think that’s correct.

It’s a very old position, at least going back to the middle of the twentieth century, when the United States decided to become more involved in global affairs, particularly European affairs. It had been previously that you really need to focus on great power competition. This has been a drum that’s been beaten in both the Democratic and Republican parties, but particularly in the Republican Party.

This was basically Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon’s major conviction, which was that the war in Vietnam distracted from dealing with larger and more important powers like the Soviet Union and China. And also, one might add, it took Nixon and Kissinger a while to actually get out of Vietnam themselves. It’s easy to be drawn into these types of foreign situations.

So I think this is the inherent tension in imperial management: you could have a grand strategy that says you need to focus on China today, or, back in the 1970s under Kissinger and Nixon, on the Soviet Union. But when you’re a great empire, you have all of these involvements and commitments around the world, and you wind up getting bogged down in what international relations theorists would call “peripheral interests.” I think that’s precisely what you’re seeing in the Middle East. Famously, Jake Sullivan, right before the October 7 attacks, gave a speech in which he was trumpeting how the United States was less bogged down in the Middle East than ever before.

So the question for the Trump administration and for someone like Elbridge Colby is, is he going to be able to basically ignore things that are of immediate concern, for example what’s going on in Syria or what’s going on in Israel, and refocus the national security bureaucracy and establishment toward great power competition with China? Which is precisely what Colby wants — my understanding is that Colby wants to maintain the United States’s hegemonic position in East Asia, and wants to maintain its global hegemonic position, and to do that, he wants to confront China. This is the question to look out for. Is that going to be possible?

I think it’s very much an open question, and it’s not going to be easy for someone like Colby to push the ship of state in one direction. So what I imagine will happen is that different parts of the national security state will wind up focusing on different things, and we’ll have to wait and see what the tenor of the entire administration is going to be.

This is a big problem that, I would say, even a lot of people on our side disagree with me about, and I think it’s fair. I think it’s going to be near impossible for the United States to actually rebuild an industrial base that is going to provide the type of employment that reigned during the height of the the early Cold War, in the 1950s and ’60s and into the ’70s, when a form of military Keynesianism really did provide regional growth and employment to people.

The manufacturing sector of the United States has not only gone abroad, but with various technological innovations, you just need fewer industrial workers. This is, of course, a gigantic issue and concern from the Left that many people have written about. This is another reason why I’m not especially frightened of Trumpism as a vital political force, because I think it’s backward-looking and steeped in fantasia that’s not connected to material reality — which is that not many of the United States’ workers actually work in industrial employment, and tariffs aren’t really going to bring back jobs or provide a stable base for the Trump administration.

I think we’re entering a period in which we will be switching frequently between parties, Republican and Democrat, because neither is going to going to have the forward-looking economic vision — a vision that by definition has to be populist — that is going to be able to consolidate a stable coalition that is going to be able to give it repeated victories.

So I think the tariffs are just a return to a 1930s-era policy that doesn’t really make sense. That is, it doesn’t really make sense in the actual world of the 2020s. This is primarily because what you actually need to do is serious economic redistribution from the wealthy to others; that in this knowledge-based, service, financialized economy, wealth has been so concentrated in the upper echelons of society, which has created an enormous discontent, and no amount of tariffs is going to change that. You need to do real economic redistribution, which I don’t think the Trump administration is going to do. So I don’t think it’s going to be able to develop a stable coalition.

My read on this entire situation is that the United States and its policymakers believe, without any historical or empirical justification, that they can remain hegemonic in East Asia. This is what people thought in the 1990s. This is what people thought after World War II. And to me, it’s just a total fantasy. Obviously China, a gigantic power, a civilization that has proven incredibly adept at modernizing itself and developing itself even as it has significant problems, has been very successful in reshoring its power base. It’s very obvious to me that within the next ten to twenty-five years China is going to be regionally hegemonic in East Asia.

So American policymakers who grew up in an era of total American domination, particularly in the unipolar moment of the 1990s, are under the mistaken impression that their nation is going to be able to be hegemonic in East Asia. So ultimately, all of the tensions derive from that. The fantasy of American regional hegemony in East Asia is going to meet the reality of the fact that China is actually in East Asia.

I haven’t had a lot to say about this. Mearsheimer isn’t a figure on the Left by any stretch of the imagination.

It’s kind of funny — at the founding conference of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where I’m a nonresident fellow and I believe Mearsheimer is as well, I sat next to him for one of the lunches, and we had an hour-long discussion about whether the United States is going to be able to remain regionally hegemonic in East Asia. Mearsheimer was of the firm conviction that the US needed to do everything it could to maintain regional hegemony. And I was of the conviction that whether or not one wanted that — and I should add I don’t want that, for various philosophical and moral reasons — it is in my mind a near-impossibility. I think Mearsheimer is just a classic realist of his generation, almost a Kissingerian realist in a sense, in that he doesn’t believe the United States should be involved deeply in areas that are of peripheral interest.

East Asia will be a major issue for the Left in the coming decades. Probably the great foreign policy issue is, how do we deal with the US policy in East Asia? I think we should adopt the classic anti-imperial position that people who actually live in the regions should be the ones determining what happens in their region, that external sources of power and authority, like the United States, should not dictate affairs in regions that are not their own, and that the United States should do what it can to leave East Asia without totally abandoning its allies.