Global Tantrum! with Steve Palley and Prof. Galen Jackson

Steve Palley, Galen Jackson
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Politics
  • Updated Weekly

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

  1. Jul 18

    Why Regime Change Fails

    Galen Jackson’s new War on the Rocks essay examines five regime-change campaigns, from Suez and Lebanon to Iraq, Libya, and Iran, and asks why outside powers keep making the same gamble. The central mistake is confusing tactical success with political control. Great powers can destroy targets, topple governments, and kill leaders. They cannot manufacture legitimacy, national cohesion, or a stable replacement regime. Why keep trying? Decapitation looks cheap and decisive, military superiority feels like political leverage, and occasional apparent successes in places such as Panama and Venezuela invite bad analogies. In the Middle East, nationalism, weak institutions, and rival intervention make the wager even worse. We discuss Galen’s article, the failures from Iran in 1953 to Libya in 2011, the comparisons with Germany, Japan, and Latin America, and why the current Iran war shows that the old lesson still has not been learned. Also in this episode: we talk about a quieter change in academic publishing. Peer-reviewed journals still reward rigor, but they are slow, expensive, and often inaccessible outside universities. Hybrid outlets such as War on the Rocks let scholars bring research-based arguments to policymakers and the public, though tenure incentives have not fully caught up. In an era of abundant opinion and declining trust in expertise, we argue that academics should engage more without abandoning the standards that make their expertise worth hearing. 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

    Why Regime Change Fails

  2. Jul 11

    Politicizing The Pentagon

    On July 3rd, C.Q. Brown, the Air Force general Trump fired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs in February 2025, published an essay in Foreign Affairs with Duke political scientist Peter Feaver, warning what happens when a country asks too much of its military. He never names Trump or Hegseth. He doesn't have to. In the sixteen months since Brown's dismissal, Pete Hegseth has fired or forced out more than a dozen general and flag officers, most recently Chris Donahue, the commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, in June. The American civil-military canon is built on a different kind of crisis. Truman and MacArthur, Lincoln and McClellan, Obama and McChrystal. Those were fights over strategy, with generals straining against civilian control. What's happening now is a different and potentially more serious problem. Nobody disputes that the Secretary of War has the authority to fire whomever he wants. The question is what it means when the firings are about composition rather than competence, and when the officers being removed keep turning out to share certain demographic characteristics. Hegseth has been explicit that his priority is getting wokeness out of the military. But the deeper worry has less to do with him than with three conditions stacking up at once. First, a force that fewer than one percent of Americans serve in; second, a hyperpolarized country that has lost faith in nearly every other institution; and third, a formerly ironclad norm that the military should be apolitical that the civilian side keeps bending. The military is the last American institution both parties still respect. That is precisely what makes it worth capturing. We discuss Hegseth’s 2025 Quantico spectacle and the silence that met it, why Huntington's clean separation of soldier and state was always something of a fiction, and why the thing to fear isn't a man on horseback but a citizenry that invites him in. 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

    Politicizing The Pentagon

  3. Jun 27

    Hezbollah's Still Here

    The Iran war is winding down, but one front never closed. In southern Lebanon, Israel and Hezbollah are still trading fire, and it’s become one of the biggest sticking points left in the deal between Iran and the United States. The old question is back: what do you actually do about Hezbollah? What CAN you do? Here’s what’s hard about Hezbollah: it is two things at once. On the one hand, it’s a Lebanese political party that holds seats in parliament and runs the clinics and schools the failing Lebanese state can’t. On the other, it’s an Iranian-built army sitting on tens of thousands of missiles, many now cheaply upgraded with GPS guidance, pointed at northern Israel. You can’t bomb away the second without reckoning with the first. In the last few years, Israel has hit Hezbollah harder than ever: the 2024 pager attack, the assassination of longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah, supply lines severed when the Assad regime fell in Syria. And yet the organization persists. The only durable fix is political, and Lebanon’s sectarian deadlock makes that nearly impossible. So Israel is left “mowing the grass,” racking up tactical wins that never add up to a strategic one. We trace Hezbollah from the rubble of Lebanon’s civil war to the Party of God of today, why Iran built it and won’t let go, and why beating Hezbollah on the battlefield may not be the same thing as winning. 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

    Hezbollah's Still Here

  4. Jun 20

    Is Israel Losing USA?

    On June 14th, the U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding to end the Iran War. The Strait of Hormuz reopens, sanctions lift, and a $300 billion reconstruction fund is on the table. Iran got nearly everything it wanted. America got out. Trump marked the same day by turning 80 and hosting a UFC card on the White House lawn. Iran is off his radar, and he’s turned the keys over to JD Vance. But the deal’s biggest loser isn’t Washington, it’s Jerusalem. Like the U.S. Israel got exactly none of its war aims: nothing on Iran’s regime, missiles, proxies, or uranium enrichment. And Vice President Vance followed up by delivering the bluntest public rebuke of an Israeli government in living memory. So if JD Vance is now holding the keys, Benjamin Netanyahu, titan of modern Israeli politics, is holding the bag. Why does this matter? It’s very simple: the U.S. has an ocean and can (in theory) afford to not pay close attention to who is in charge of what in the Persian Gulf. This is very much not the case for Israel, whose mortal regional enemy has just been empowered. Plus, as American public opinion turns, with 60% now viewing Israel unfavorably, and young voters in both parties leading the shift, the strategic, political, and moral cases for continuing unconditional U.S. support for Israel are all eroding at once. We dig into Netanyahu’s shrinking options, the precedents from Eisenhower to Bush that show how these U.S.-Israel breaches usually end, and why this one might be the first that actually sticks. 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 Israel Losing USA?

  5. Jun 13

    America's Empty Arsenal

    Trump’s recent military excursion against Iran wins several awards from the Global Tantrum Academy: 1) Most Declarations Of Victory, 2) Best Maritime Rescue By A Supporting Autonomous Boat, and 3) Largest Expenditure Of Ultra-Rare Munitions In A Losing Campaign. Depending on what happens over the next three to five years, while the US defense majors crank into gear replacing said munitions, that last one might become the most significant outcome of the conflict. The US blew a quarter to a half of its stockpile of its advanced offensive and defensive missiles trying to overthrow the Islamic Republic and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, leaving our armories depleted and our allies scrambling for options. The door for a certain near-peer competitor to make trouble has opened a little wider. Why in the world would it take the US that long to restock its arsenal? Part of the issue is that the American defense majors have had little meaningful domestic competition for decades, leaving them slow, flabby, and unable to innovate. Another issue is that America globalized away its critical defense supply chains, leaving it something like 2 million skilled tradesmen and defense industrial workers short. And a third problem involves the Pentagon’s procurement strategy, which is now somewhere between one and three decades behind current battlefield needs. So, we’ve got some problems. But as they say, war reveals truth, and the US might now have an opportunity to make the necessary reforms… 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

    America's Empty Arsenal

  6. Jun 6

    America's Debt Trap

    Most Americans don’t know this: the United States technically defaulted on its debts not once but twice in the last century: once in 1933 and again in 1971. Luckily, the country won World War 2 in between those two incidents, which counted for a lot in terms of international credibility and creditworthiness. However, as any consumer currently out over his or her skis will know, lenders do not make a habit of propping up unsustainable borrowing forever. Not even the most powerful and successful country in world history can ignore this law of financial gravity forever. But the U.S. certainly seems to be trying, especially since the turn of the 21st century. The country’s debt to GDP ratio shot past 100% recently, and it’s now spending more on interest payments than defense. That’s never a good sign. In this episode, we discuss the history of sovereign fiscal crises and debt defaults, the various pathways out of a looming debt trap, and where we think the US might be heading in the decades ahead. 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

    America's Debt Trap

  7. May 30

    Iran Isn't USA's "Suez Moment," But It Sure Isn't A Win

    After a bruising war with Iran, the editorials wrote themselves: the Strait of Hormuz closed, US bases hit, interceptors burned, and nothing decisive to show for it. Pundits reached for the ultimate decline metaphor. Could this be America’s “Suez Moment,” referring here to the the 1956 foreign policy fiasco / humiliation that ended Britain and France’s time as major independent global actors? We don’t buy it. Suez worked as a death knell because there was a senior partner, the United States, able to bankrupt London and Paris if they failed to toe the line. In 2026 there’s no one who can play that role against Washington. Suez was a story about can’t. America’s problem is won’t, and occasionally will, but in the wrong place at the wrong time. That distinction matters because the real game isn’t the Persian Gulf; it’s East Asia. So the question becomes whether a loss to Iran dents US credibility where it counts: around the Taiwan Strait. One school says credibility is one interconnected currency; another, the “differentiated credibility” camp, says what matters is the local balance, not what you did three theaters away. We work through the Suez history, the balancing-vs-bandwagoning problem in the Middle East, what allies in Seoul and Taipei actually learned watching this war, and why in international politics “you can come back, but you (maybe) can’t come back all the way.” 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

    Iran Isn't USA's "Suez Moment," But It Sure Isn't A Win

  8. May 23

    Cuba Goes Dark

    After the US deposed Maduro and installed Delcy Rodriguez in Caracas, Venezuela stopped shipping oil to Cuba. That oil, heavily subsidized in exchange for Cuban doctors, teachers, and security advisors since the Chávez era, was the foundation of the Cuban economy. The last Russian tanker arrived in March. Now there’s no replacement coming and Cubans are living through 22-hour-a-day blackouts. This isn’t a humanitarian story dressed up as geopolitics. The USS Nimitz strike group is parked under Southern Command. Trump’s DOJ just indicted 94-year-old Raul Castro for the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shootdown, 30 years after the fact, and conveniently right as the vice tightens. The administration is offering $100 million in food aid, but only through the Catholic Church. Why now? Cuba imports 70% of its food, has no fuel, no electricity, no Soviet patron, and a regime that depends on Venezuelan oil it can no longer get. Meanwhile, the presence of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian military and intelligence assets on Cuban soil a mere 90 miles from US territory has raised the administration’s hackles. So the question isn’t whether something happens. It’s what: civil collapse, a quiet Castro exit, a Maduro-style “tyrant change,” or something messier. We work through the historical parallels (yes, Bay of Pigs comes up), the strategic logic of squeezing Havana now, and why we’re skeptical about US troops on the ground, even if the indictment hints otherwise. 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

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

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