Daniel Bessner
speaker
120 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 4 Aug
Daniel Bessner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, I thought you were all going to write a song.
Thank you so much for having me.
Really happy to be here.
Absolutely.
So I think there's something interesting happening in how Americans understand their role in the world and what I would term the American empire, which is this notion that there's really no changing it, that there's really no way to transform the American empire, to transform geopolitics.
And I think this is a transformation from how Americans understood their world role to
as recently as the 1990s, when someone like Madeleine Albright could say on the Today Show that the United States sees further than other countries, which gives us license to act in the world.
I think the failures of the global war on terror and also the end of what I would call mass politics, the inability of people to actually affect foreign policy and economic policy in a number of other issue areas, has engendered this cynicism about American power
But this idea that we must nevertheless act in the world, but then we feel guilty about it and don't think that anything could really change.
So the way that I think about imperialist realism is that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of the American empire.
Sure.
So I think this is why it actually matters, because I think that the world is becoming a more multipolar world.
The United States was uniquely powerful, both after World War II, where it controlled something like half of the world's manufacturing base.
had an atomic monopoly that is a monopoly of atomic weapons, really had the world's only real air force.
And the more we learn about the Soviet Union, particularly in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, the more we learn that it was actually incredibly weak, much weaker than Americans could have really known at the time.
And then, of course, after the end of the Cold War, the United States was the last remaining superpower.
It was really the global hegemon.
This was the so-called unipolar moment, which Charles Krauthammer termed that Charles Krauthammer
basically identified.
But I think that two things have happened in the last 25 years.
Showing 1–20 of 120 · page 1 of 6
Next →