Chartbook Video #4: Talking COVID and geopolitics with Bruno Macaes and Sophia Gaston

Plus Afghanistan, the New Statesman etc.

Bruno Macaes and I both have books out right now about global politics and the COVID crisis. Bruno’s is with Hurst.

It was a real privilege to read his book ahead of release and to discuss our many points of convergence and also our differences here. Such an interesting pairing with Shutdown.

Bruno is someone I really love listening to. Many thanks to Sophia Gaston and the British Foreign Policy Group for this lovely Labor Day Holiday warm-up to a frenetic release week.

Bruno is a fellow contributing writer to The New Statesman. A geopolitical writer who truly lives on a global scale, Bruno was actually in Kabul days before the Ghani regime fell and penned this remarkable report for NS.

His “on the ground”-piece, makes for quite a cocktail when read in combination with my deliberately distanced effort to make sense of American power post-Kabul.

Loved this reader’s response to the article online.

GreySmithereens @GreySmithereens

Loved this article by @adam_tooze. It's hard to tell what he thinks about these changes, it reminds me of some Marxist writings about industrial development. one part horror, one part fascination.

newstatesman.comThe new age of American powerIn August 2021, the dismaying scenes at Kabul airport stirred a number of gloomy pronouncements about the decline of American power. The anguished tone of these reactions reflects not just the horror on the ground, but a sense of personal betrayal felt by the pundit class. For anyone with a historic…

The highest compliment.

At the weekend I will run Chartbook #36 digging into the Pentagon data a bit more.

To wrap one’s head around the US military budget is a daunting undertaking. I’ll be scratching the surface. You have to start somewhere.

The New Statesman article is all about the mysteriously named “third offset”. In Chartbook’s to come I will be taking up the issue of the “Second offset” and how the American army learned to stop worrying and to love the Wehrmacht.

That was one of the issues I was batting around with Leo Aschenbrenner on twitter yesterday. Leo is one of the super smart young folks to come out of Columbia this year. Not hard to see why I enjoy my job so much!

Leopold Aschenbrenner @leopoldasch

@adam_tooze @matthewstoller Reading *Wages* and *Deluge* the throughline is of overwhelming US economic might being key. Even if eg in WWI actual US military embryonic. Why would military power and GDP now be decoupled, as you are, sort of, arguing here? Sounds like Wunderwaffen or myth of Blitzkrieg.

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