By David Pan · Monday, August 8, 2022 Dear Telos readers,
I’m excited to invite you to attend a special event at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in New York City on October 14–15, 2022, to celebrate the 200th issue of Telos, which will be appearing in Fall 2022. You can register for the event at the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website, at www.telosinstitute.net/telos200. The event will take place from 3 pm to 6 pm on October 14 and from 9 am to 5 pm on October 15. The admission is $100 for both days and includes a reception on October 14 and lunch on October 15.
The event will feature Joel Kotkin (author of The New Class Conflict) and Michael Lind (author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite) as keynote speakers, who will discuss the new politics of class.
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By Telos Press · Monday, July 25, 2022 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Mark G.E. Kelly and Timothy W. Luke about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its consequences for world order. Our current issue, Telos 199 (Summer 2022), features essays by Luke, Kelly, and Pan on the war in Ukraine, excerpts of which appear here. Click through to read the full articles at the Telos Online website (subscription required). To learn how your university can subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 199 are also available for purchase in our online store.
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By Gordon G. Chang · Monday, June 6, 2022 “The Russian invasion of Ukraine has put an end to the globalization we have experienced over the last three decades,” wrote Larry Fink in his March 24 letter to BlackRock shareholders. “We had already seen connectivity between nations, companies, and even people strained by two years of the pandemic.”
Fink, who oversees $10 trillion of wealth as the world’s largest asset manager, is right to be concerned that an era has ended. “Globalization—as promoted by the United States over the past 70 years—has led to the greatest reduction in poverty and the biggest decline in interstate conflict in human history,” writes Matthew Rooney of the George W. Bush Institute.
So will the world, in Fink’s new era, be less prosperous and peaceful? Many think high levels of trade—in other words, continued interdependence—will save the day, yet this view is debatable. “Does trade increase or decrease the likelihood of conflict?” Samuel Huntington, the late Harvard political scientist, asked in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, his landmark 1996 book. “The assumption that it reduces the probability of war between nations is, at a minimum, not proven, and much evidence exists to the contrary.”
Huntington, building on the work of others, pointed out that it is expectation that drives events. “Economic interdependence fosters peace,” he wrote, “only ‘when states expect that high trade levels will continue into the foreseeable future.'”
So what is happening in the post-invasion period? The World Trade Organization in April predicted that merchandise trade would grow 3.0% this year—down from a previous forecast of 4.7%—but admitted growth could be as low as 0.5%.
Last year’s trade volume—the WTO put total merchandise trade at a staggering $22.4 trillion after growth of 9.8%—set a record, but that figure could decline this year. Last year’s volume was the result of a sugar high, boosted by one-time government stimulus measures. Resulting commodity price increases further inflated trade statistics. The factors driving trade in 2021, the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development correctly stated in February, will “abate.”
Projections of increasing trade depend on forecasts of continuing prosperity. There is concern, however, that a downturn is coming and it will be especially severe. “You’d better brace yourself,” Jamie Dimon, the influential CEO of JPMorgan Chase, told a financial conference in New York in early June. He said everyone should expect not “storm clouds”—his previous prediction—but a “hurricane,” which could be “a minor one or Superstorm Sandy.”
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, May 3, 2022 In his new book, The Travails of Trumpification, a series of critical essays written over the course of Donald J. Trump's presidency, Timothy W. Luke explores how the recent twists and turns in the civic life of the United States have precipitated a dangerous transformation of American political culture. Tim recently talked with Mark S. Weiner about the book and the current precarious state of U.S. politics.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, March 28, 2022 One of the surprising aspects of the Ukraine War is that it came as a surprise. After the devastation that Russia wreaked in Chechnya, after the invasion of Georgia, after the occupation of Crimea—and the list goes on: after Russia’s complicity in the destruction of Aleppo and the violence of the Wagner Group deployments especially in Africa, and, most obviously, after Putin’s explicit declaration of his intent, the West could nevertheless watch Russia prepare for the invasion and still believe that it would not happen. Before the invasion would have been the time to arm Ukraine. Instead the West succumbed to a Chamberlain-like logic of self-delusion: if we do nothing, the aggressor will dissipate. The wishful thinking of liberalism is a scourge. It remains to be seen whether the brutality of Russian violence will change that mindset in the foreign policy elite. Optimism is not warranted.
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By David Pan · Wednesday, March 16, 2022 Telos 198 (Spring 2022): Challenging State Sovereignty: Mutual Aid or Civil War? is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 State sovereignty has a complicated relationship to individual rights. They are clearly in opposition, and both left-wing anarchist and right-wing libertarian critiques of the state have attempted to defend individual freedoms against the power of the state. Yet more traditional liberals and conservatives often see the state as the guarantor of individual rights, the left looking to the state as a provider of welfare services to the disadvantaged, and neoconservatives defending state power as the guarantor of individual rights against foreign aggressors as well as domestic enemies. These four different approaches map out a political landscape that is divided not just into left–right but also into pro- and anti-state tendencies.
In spite of this fragmentation, though, there are two main concerns that are shared. In the first place, there seems to be a general recognition among these different perspectives that the inhabitants of a state are not completely homogeneous and that the internal heterogeneity of a state should be at least in part the basis for domestic order. If libertarians prefer market-based structures and traditional conservatives look to family and religion, liberals seem to have gravitated toward identity-based groupings, and anarchists might prefer mutual aid organizations as independent places of sovereignty within which individuals can define themselves. The disagreements concern the type of heterogeneity that is being called for as well as the precise mechanisms for supporting diverse organizations within the state.
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