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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
One, the United States squandered its global power.
You see with the global war on terror and just failure after failure there, whether you're looking at Iraq, Libya, or Afghanistan, just total disintegration of American foreign policy there.
And then you also have the Great Recession, which I think has really damaged the United States' global position.
And so you have those two things coupled with the quote-unquote rise of China, but really the reemergence of China as a major global power, which it was for most of human history, and also the reemergence of Russia as a global power.
So you have this new multipolar world.
And just to wrap up here, why this is important is that this is precisely the moment where we need to imagine alternatives to American global empire and
Because this alternative is going to happen.
The question is not a matter of if but when.
And the real issue for us in this country is how we manage this transition to multipolarity.
Is it going to be violent or is it going to be not violent?
Absolutely.
And it's a really important question.
So perhaps the easiest way to see this is to compare something like the George W. Bush administration's national security strategy
With national security strategies, and this is where I think it's interesting from not only the Trump administration, but the Biden administration.
When you look back on the war on terror, George W. Bush national security strategies, you see consistent references to democracy promotion, to democracy promotion being the key to American security.
And this, you know, I'm an elder millennial.
this really defined american foreign policy in the 2000s and really even into the 2010s obama himself also talks about things like democracy and humanity and humane war uh and bringing effectively liberalism to the international uh space but i think that this is as you said crystal this is just impossible to believe after the global war on terror and what you see and this is really interesting this transition to begin
not even really in the first Trump administration, but more so in the Biden administration.
So if you remember, Biden came into office framing international politics as a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.
But when you actually look at how policymakers in the Biden administration talked, for example, about the Ukraine war and Russia's invasion of Ukraine,
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