Global Tantrum! with Steve Palley and Prof. Galen Jackson

Steve Palley, Galen Jackson
  • 5.0 (3)
  • Politics
  • Weekly

Two International Relations PhDs help you make sense of the post-postwar era. globaltantrum.substack.com

  1. 6d ago

    Can France Break Europe?

    France’s political stalemate has become a financial problem, and its financial problem is becoming Europe’s. Steve Palley and Galen Jackson look at the protests, the resistance to pension and spending reforms, and the pressure building on a country that wants to preserve its social model without a clear way to pay for it. The European Commission’s forecast shows why the argument over the budget will outlast any single government. The last eurozone crisis offers a warning, but France is a different proposition from Greece. Its economy is larger, its political weight is greater, and its borrowing problems would be harder for the rest of Europe to contain. We discuss the limits of a common currency without a common budget, the painful tradeoffs behind a rescue, and why the ECB’s bond-purchase tools do not make the political choices disappear. What happens if voters turn to Marine Le Pen or Jean-Luc Mélenchon? We consider whether the demands of governing might pull a populist leader toward the center, or whether a change in Paris could weaken support for Ukraine and deepen Europe’s divisions. The presidential polling makes the question immediate; it does not settle the outcome. France’s history inside NATO helps explain why its choices matter beyond its borders. We end with the harder question: can aging democracies make changes their voters do not want? Immigration, faster growth and AI-driven productivity each promise an escape from the arithmetic, with very different costs and uncertainties. Meanwhile, Britain’s renewed discussion of its long-term relationship with the EU adds an irony to a moment when the European project’s future looks unusually unsettled. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com

    Can France Break Europe?

  2. Oct 17

    Is China Winning the Cyberwar?

    China’s hackers have reached deep into American networks, but what would it mean to be winning a cyberwar? Steve Palley and Galen Jackson take up Anne Neuberger’s argument that America needs a new strategy of deterrence and The Cyber Gap, by Matthew Ferren, Adam Segal and Rush Doshi. We ask whether weak defenses tell us enough about the larger strategic balance, especially when so much of the offensive side remains classified. One proposed answer is to build digital twins of critical infrastructure: virtual systems where defenders can test changes without disrupting the real thing. The idea has roots in NASA’s use of models and simulators during Apollo. Could AI make these systems easier to build and useful enough that companies adopt them for their own reasons? Or does the political problem survive the technical solution? That brings us to regulation, business incentives and the limits of federal action. We revisit the 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy’s push to shift responsibility toward technology providers and discuss the new government-supervised program for private cyber operations against foreign criminal groups. That program requires government oversight and mission approval; it does not grant companies a general license to retaliate on their own. We close with a question familiar from nuclear strategy: how much relative advantage matters if each side can still impose unacceptable costs? Espionage, theft and a destructive attack during a Taiwan crisis present different problems. The distinction between Salt Typhoon’s telecom espionage and Volt Typhoon’s infrastructure targeting matters here. Better defenses remain worth pursuing even if the claim that China is winning turns out to be harder to establish. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com

    Is China Winning the Cyberwar?

  3. Oct 10

    Can Distance Still Protect America?

    Two new papers point toward different strategic futures. Eli Sanchez argues that emerging technology is unlikely to make the oceans transparent. Steve Palley and Galen Jackson discuss what that means for submarine survivability, nuclear deterrence, and the political conflicts that a stable balance of terror cannot settle. Erik Sand’s study of the new missile age presents a more unsettling prospect: precision conventional ICBMs could become militarily relevant within a decade. What happens if distance stops protecting bomber bases and other vulnerable targets? We examine the incentives to strike first and the danger of mistaking a conventional launch for a nuclear attack. Missile defense offers another complication. The physics of intercepting an ICBM does not become easier because its warhead is conventional. We consider what renewed investment might achieve, what it could do to nuclear stability, and why a successful test or a theater-defense system cannot settle those questions. The discussion also draws on reported threats against US bombers in Britain and the implications of drones reaching aircraft far from a frontline. Can nuclear deterrence remain robust while conventional warfare becomes more tempting? We close with that tension and a recommendation for The Myth of Military Victory, by Stephen Biddle, Sam Winter-Levy, and Yuri Zhukov. Military capabilities shape the bargaining environment; whether they resolve the political dispute is another question. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com

    Can Distance Still Protect America?

  4. Oct 3

    Who Can Control AI?

    The White House has brought leading AI companies together around voluntary safety commitments. But what does self-policing mean when the same companies are racing to build more capable systems? Steve Palley and Galen Jackson look at the promises, the incentives, and the gap between corporate oversight and public control. The administration’s new terminology order adds another wrinkle: calling everything superintelligence does not settle what the technology can do. Anthropic’s analysis of GLM-5.3 sharpens the problem. A downloadable model can develop sophisticated cyber exploits, while its safeguards can be weakened or removed. We discuss what those results establish, what they leave uncertain, and why the spread of capabilities changes the choices facing governments and defenders. We then take up Hal Brands’s argument about America’s superintelligence dilemma, listed in his Foreign Affairs bibliography: pursue supremacy, seek shared development, or try to suppress the technology. Each route has costs. Nuclear and biological arms control offer useful comparisons, but AI’s civilian benefits and wider accessibility make the analogy incomplete. Recent US-China trade arrangements do not amount to an AI governance regime. Finally, we separate the risks of human-directed attacks from models acting outside their assigned limits. OpenAI’s Hugging Face incident account and Australian incident review make containment a practical question. Alongside the Council on Foreign Relations’ cyber resilience report, these cases raise a harder question: can institutions improve fast enough to handle the systems they are already building? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com

    Who Can Control AI?

  5. Sep 26

    Saudi Arabia's Worst-Case Scenario

    The Houthis have rapidly expanded their control along Yemen’s western coast, seizing Mocha and strategically important Red Sea positions. That advance gives them more leverage around the Bab el-Mandeb just as a reported Iran-aligned militia attack put Saudi Arabia’s East-West oil pipeline under pressure. Riyadh wants help. Mohammed bin Salman reportedly asked Donald Trump to intervene against the Houthis, but the White House held off. Saudi Arabia still has money, reserves, and time, but its reliable ways to move oil around the Strait of Hormuz are narrowing. Andrew Leber joins us to explain why the Houthis are a harder problem than a conventional Iranian proxy. They receive Iranian support, but they have their own political goals, their own local base, and their own reasons to push for control of Yemen. That independence makes a broader deal with Tehran harder to translate into a durable settlement. The episode also looks beyond the immediate crisis. The new Makkah defense agreement links Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey, but it does not guarantee that either partner would fight Iran. The United States remains powerful in the region, yet its military capacity and political appetite are both more limited than Gulf allies once assumed. We ask what Saudi Arabia can still do, whether a renewed bombing campaign would change anything, and whether the least bad option now runs through another uneasy accommodation with Iran and the Houthis. Further reading: Andrew Leber and Lesley Anne Warner, “The Impacts of the Houthis’ Advance Could Extend Well Beyond Saudi Arabia”, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 23, 2026. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com

    Saudi Arabia's Worst-Case Scenario

  6. Sep 19

    The War on Terror's Legacy

    Steve and Galen look back at September 11 and the decisions that followed, from the first campaign in Afghanistan to the invasion of Iraq and the rise of the Islamic State. The conversation asks which choices were unavoidable, which were errors, and why the difference still matters. The hosts also trace the roots of al-Qaeda, the Taliban’s sanctuary in Afghanistan, and the regional politics that shaped the wars. The result is less a simple verdict on counterterrorism than a look at how a narrow mission became a much larger project. A recent Foreign Affairs essay by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon prompts the episode’s second question: what did the war on terror do to American politics? Steve and Galen discuss surveillance, civil liberties, fear, and the long shadow of an open-ended security state. Twenty-five years on, the costs are easier to count than the alternatives. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates roughly $8 trillion in broad U.S. budgetary costs for the post-9/11 wars. The harder question is what a more limited response could have achieved. Join us for that debate. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com

    The War on Terror's Legacy

  7. Sep 12

    Agentic AI and the Future of Cyberwarfare

    AI is getting better at finding vulnerabilities. Whether that makes the world safer is a different question. Lennart Maschmeyer’s International Security article argues that defenders stand to gain more than attackers. Steve Palley and Galen Jackson use that argument to ask whether increasingly capable AI agents are changing the balance. We put the article alongside Anthropic’s account of an AI-assisted espionage campaign and the independent investigation of the Hugging Face incident. A system that finds a bug is one thing. An agent that keeps working, coordinates with other agents, and finds ways around obstacles presents a different problem for the people defending a network. There are two risks running through the discussion: governments using powerful systems against each other, and systems behaving in ways their operators did not intend. The distinction matters for deterrence. We debate whether nuclear weapons are the right comparison, or whether the difficulty of containing biological threats tells us more about what could go wrong. The United States and China both have reasons to keep pushing. That competitive pressure could make cooperation hardest just when it becomes most useful. We close with the prospects for AI arms control, the danger of a perceived first-strike advantage, and the uncomfortable question of how much control governments and companies can actually retain. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com

    Agentic AI and the Future of Cyberwarfare

  8. Sep 5

    Is This World War III?

    Would we recognize a world war before historians gave it a name? Bret Stephens’s recent essay gives us a reason to ask. Fighting in Ukraine and the Middle East, cooperation among authoritarian powers, and the possibility of war over Taiwan make the 1930s comparison tempting. Steve Palley and Galen Jackson work through where it helps and where it breaks down. Nuclear weapons are the biggest difference. They make another march on Berlin hard to imagine, but they also make a confrontation over something a government considers essential far more dangerous. Deterrence might prevent a great-power war. It might also leave leaders gambling inside a crisis they cannot easily control. Then there’s the question of who could actually fight. Drones are changing the battlefield, American interceptor supplies are strained, and China leads global manufacturing. The industrial advantage that helped the Allies win the last world war cannot simply be assumed this time. Neither can the ability of robots to make war less destructive. The discussion ends with the United States. Would Americans fight to preserve their position, or try to sit the next conflict out? The current national security strategy still prioritizes Taiwan, even as it turns toward the Western Hemisphere. We also get into debt, the dollar, and whether a shift in economic power could settle the contest before the military question is answered. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit globaltantrum.substack.com

    Is This World War III?
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Two International Relations PhDs help you make sense of the post-postwar era. globaltantrum.substack.com

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