Imperialism and Foreign Policy
23 Nov 2024
Featuring Hilary Goodfriend and Jorge Cuéllar in the final installment of a three-part series on Central America. This episode picks up with Nayib Bukele’s authoritarian crypto enthusiasm in El Salvador; Daniel Ortega’s perversion of Sandinismo’s...
18 Nov 2024
Featuring Hilary Goodfriend & Jorge Cuéllar in the second of a three (not two!) part series on the history and present of Central America. This interview picks up our discussion of revolutionary armed struggles against...
03 Nov 2024
Featuring Hilary Goodfriend and Jorge Cuéllar on the history of Central America. This is the first episode in a two-part series covering the late-19th and early-20th century rise of export-crop oligarchies and constant US intervention,...
11 Oct 2024
Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the third and final part of the epilogue to Thawra (Revolution), our epic series on the history of revolutionary Arab politics. This episode takes us from Hamas’s victory in the 2006...
04 Oct 2024
Featuring Jake Werner on how the US and China entered into a New Cold War and why the whole world urgently needs an alternative international order that fosters great power cooperation.
25 Sep 2024
Featuring Aslı Bâli and Aziz Rana on the history of left-wing internationalism from the Third Worldist currents that powered decolonization and struggles against neocolonialism through today’s renewed politics in solidarity with the Palestinian national liberation...
19 Sep 2024
Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the second of what has become a three-part epilogue to Thawra (Revolution), our series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. This episode takes us from the disastrous Oslo...
30 Aug 2024
Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the first of a two-part epilogue to Thawra (Revolution), our series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment covers the Iranian Islamic Revolution’s huge impact across the...
30 Jul 2024
Today’s installment traces a massive defeat for the Palestinian Revolution: Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and brutal siege of Beirut. Under severe pressure and isolated in the wake of Egypt’s normalization with Israel, the PLO...
17 Jul 2024
Today’s installment addresses the Palestinian Revolution’s project in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan—leading up to the 1970 conflict with the Jordanian state and the violent expulsion of PLO guerrillas during Black September. Then, Egypt and Syria...
07 Jul 2024
Today’s installment covers the rise of the Palestinian Revolution and then its explosion after the Arab defeat in the June War of 1967 with Israel. Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation and Palestine, and...
19 Jun 2024
Today’s installment covers the armed left-wing revolutionary movements that challenged British imperial power across Southern Arabia, with the National Liberation Front taking over South Yemen and Dhufari rebels in Oman waging a liberation war against...
09 Jun 2024
Today’s installment tells the story of Saudi Arabia, a country whose reactionary, US-aligned trajectory was throughout the 1950s and 60s challenged by labor strikes, dissident currents, rebellious princes, and an anticolonial oil minister. But Saudi...
23 May 2024
Today’s installment tells the story of the destruction of the two giant revolutionary projects of 1958: the union of Egypt and Syria under Nasser’s United Arab Republic and Iraq’s July Revolution that brought Qasim alongside...
11 May 2024
Today’s installment tells the story of Iraq’s 1958 July Revolution: a Free Officers’ coup overthrew the imperialist-aligned Hashemite monarchy and brought nationalist Abdul-Karim Qasim to power alongside a surging Communist Party. Revolutionary currents soon turned...
03 May 2024
Today’s installment covers the creation of a Palestinian national liberation movement throughout the 1950s by a people dispersed by the Nakba: organizations, alliances, and theories of change assembled in the universities, cities, and refugee camps...
26 Apr 2024
This is a compact introduction to the Movement of Arab Nationalists, which in the 1950s built a presence that stretched across the region, from Beirut and Jordan to Cairo and the Gulf—becoming a truly powerful...
10 Apr 2024
Today’s installment lays out the the US’s Eisenhower Doctrine, which in 1957 inaugurated a new era of imperialism in the Middle East; the Ba’ath Party driving Syria and Egypt into the United Arab Republic, a...
02 Apr 2024
Today’s installment lays out the intensification of the Cold War across the Middle East. Western imperialist powers attempted to recruit Arab countries to the Baghdad Pact, a Middle Eastern NATO. Nasser rallied the Arab masses...
23 Mar 2024
Today’s installment lays out the early years of a struggle for Syria that would decisively shape the Arab world: the fight for independence from France, the first (CIA-backed) coup of 1949, and the rise of...
11 Mar 2024
Today’s installment lays out the politics surrounding the Zionist settler colonial destruction of Palestine, the Nakba of 1948, and the ground-shifting event that followed in its wake: the Nasser-led 1952 Egyptian Free Officers Movement coup...
04 Mar 2024
Today’s installment is a comprehensive overview of the Middle Eastern Arab state system that crystalizes with the end of British and French colonial rule.
27 Feb 2024
Today’s installment lays out 20th century anti-colonialism, including Iraqi, Syrian, and Palestinian Great Revolts, the birth of Arab nationalism, Islamic resistance, Ba’athism, and communism.
21 Feb 2024
Today’s installment sets the stage: European imperialism in the Arab Mashriq from the late 18th century through the early 20th.
01 Feb 2024
Introducing Thawra, a miniseries on 20th century Arab politics. Over the coming 16 episodes, host Daniel Denvir and historian Abdel Razzaq Takriti delve into the history of the diverse political radicalisms and revolts that have...
23 Jan 2024
Featuring Helen Lackner on the Houthis, the politics of their attacks on Red Sea shipping, and the long history of Yemen from British colonial Aden through the current civil war.
20 Nov 2023
Featuring Richard Seymour on the global politics of the Palestinian struggle and Israel’s war on Gaza. The *second* of a two-part interview.
15 Nov 2023
Featuring Richard Seymour on the global politics of the Palestinian struggle and Israel’s war on Gaza. The first of a two-part interview.
18 Oct 2023
Featuring Noura Erakat and Arielle Angel on the apartheid system and the violence it drives in Palestine.
31 Aug 2023
Featuring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the Latin American left and the long history of US intervention in the region.
23 Mar 2023
Read Jacobin’s edited transcript here: https://jacobin.com/2023/03/greg-grandin-interview-us-policy-latin-america
05 Mar 2023
Featuring Nadia Abu El-Haj on Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America. How the civil-military divide makes troops into super citizens and what it means that agents of state violence are turning...
25 Feb 2023
Featuring Nadia Abu El-Haj on Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America. A truly remarkable book about the unseen ideological foundations of American militarism: American civilians are enjoined to venerate troops, deferring...
01 Feb 2023
Read the transcript of the first part of our interview with Spencer Ackerman on the War on Terror:
https://jacobin.com/2023/02/war-on-terror-bush-trump-911-islamophobia
07 Nov 2022
Featuring Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Golnar Nikpour on the history of modern Iran. This is the third episode in our four-part series. We pick up in the wake of the US-British 1953 coup against Mossadegh, assess...
01 Nov 2022
Featuring Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Golnar Nikpour on the history of modern Iran. This is the second episode in our four-part series. We begin in 1941 with the British-Soviet occupation of Iran, the ouster of Reza...
27 Oct 2022
Featuring Eskandar Sadeghi and Golnar Nikpour on the history of modern Iran, from 1906 through the present. This episode is the first in a four-part series, covering the period from 1906 until 1941, from the...
17 Aug 2022
Transcript of the second part of Dan’s two part interview with sociologist Ho-fung Hung on Chinese political and economic history: the 2008 financial crisis, how China’s response deepened global and domestic economic imbalances and (alongside...
16 Aug 2022
Transcript of the first part of Dan’s two part interview with sociologist Ho-fung Hung on Chinese political economic history from the 18th century to 2008: why capitalism took off in England and then elsewhere but...
23 Mar 2022
The second of our two-part interview with sociologist Ho-fung Hung on Chinese political and economic history. This episode covers the 2008 financial crisis, how China’s response deepened global and domestic economic imbalances and (alongside the...
18 Mar 2022
Part one of a two-part interview with sociologist Ho-fung Hung on Chinese political economic history from the 18th century to 2008: why capitalism took off in England and then elsewhere but not in China; and...
10 Mar 2022
Sophie Pinkham and Nick Mulder on the war, its origins, how it’s being experienced by Ukrainians, Russians, Europeans, and Americans—and also its geopolitical and global economic ramifications, particularly sanctions.
28 Feb 2022
Tony Wood returns to The Dig to discuss Russia’s invasion, what it reflects about Russian politics and geopolitics today and historically, and how the Left should be thinking about it all.
08 Feb 2022
Read the transcript here
28 Jan 2022
An in-depth interview on the historical and political-economic context of the Ukraine crisis with Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko.
24 Nov 2021
The second of Dan’s two-part interview with Piero Gleijeses on his book Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991. This is the story of Cuba’s military defense of the...
19 Nov 2021
Part one of Dan’s two-part interview with Piero Gleijeses on his book Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991. This is the story of Cuba’s military defense of the...
12 Oct 2021
Read the transcript here
12 Oct 2021
Legendary socialist scholar Tariq Ali on the long history of Afghanistan: the 19th and early 20th-century wars against the British Empire; the communist coup, Soviet invasion, and US-backed mujahideen war; the rise of the Taliban;...
20 Sep 2021
Episode three of The Dig’s War on Terror trilogy with Spencer Ackerman: Decadence, Trump, and Biden.
15 Sep 2021
Episode two of The Dig’s War on Terror trilogy with Spencer Ackerman: Obama, ISIS, and the Sustainable War.
10 Sep 2021
Episode one of The Dig’s three-part War on Terror series the with Spencer Ackerman: 9/11, bipartisan war fever, and George W. Bush.
02 Sep 2021
Media critic Adam Johnson and New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz on the media’s warmongering attack on Biden’s withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.
21 Jun 2021
The history of the United States is in no small part the history of US intervention in Latin America. Historian Greg Grandin on his classic book Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the...
24 Apr 2021
US empire in the Philippines, Filipino migration, labor organizing in the fields, and the nativist campaign for Asian exclusion. Dan interviews Rick Baldoz on his remarkable book The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in...
10 Feb 2021
Dan interviews Jeanne Morefield on her book
Empires Without Imperialism: Anglo-American Decline and the Politics of Deflection and how the disavowed wars have come home on the American Right.
19 Dec 2020
A big-picture interview with Tobita Chow and Jake Werner on China that puts today’s geopolitical conflict and repression into the context of global capitalism.
24 Jul 2020
Our police system is a product of Cold War US imperialism too. Dan interviews Stuart Schrader on
Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.
11 Jun 2020
Dan interviews returning guests Aslı Bâli and Aziz Rana on the long history behind the crisis of American imperial legitimation that has become so manifest amid the pandemic.
17 Jan 2020
The wars at home and abroad have always been connected. Dan interviews Nikhil Pal Singh on US attacks on Iran and the politics, history, and culture of American warmaking.
26 Jul 2019
Dan is taking his first week off ever in Dig history to finish his book. Here’s a classic from deep in the archives: our first interview with Aziz Rana, on his book The Two Faces...
29 Jun 2019
Listen to Episode Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance DD:Nick Estes, welcome to The Dig. Nick Estes:Thanks for having me. DD:You write...
29 Jun 2019
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17 Apr 2019
The US has played a major role in fomenting violence across Yemen, backing the Saudi and United Arab Emirates-led forces attacking the country while also conducting a direct war against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula...
13 Mar 2019
Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou explains: it’s not just that the War on Terror has warped American and European politics and society; it’s that the War on Terror and Islamic terrorist groups like ISIS have become mutually-critical...
06 Feb 2019
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01 Feb 2019
Alejandro Velasco, Gabriel Hetland and Naomi Schiller on the profound economic, social, and political crisis in Venezuela. More than three million refugees and migrants have fled the country. Opposition figure Juan Guaidó has declared himself...
30 Oct 2018
The brutality of the Saudi royal family had been hiding in plain sight. It was an open secret convenient to the political, media and business elites for whom the Kingdom means big business and an...
25 Sep 2018
Serious people in Washington are seduced by vapid and self-serving accounts of their savvy operation of the machinery of government—works like Bob Woodward’s latest exercise in extended stenography Fear: Trump in the White House. The...
17 Aug 2018
Part two of a two-part interview with Aslı Bâli on the Syrian civil war and the larger geopolitical conflicts that shape the Middle East—with an emphasis on the role played the United States. During part...
15 Aug 2018
Aslı Ü. Bâli joins Daniel for part one of a two-part interview on the Syrian Civil War and the murderously instrumentalized geopolitics that fuel it. Syrians continue to suffer and to die while various actors...
29 Jun 2018
Stephen Wertheim, a Lecturer in American and international history at Birkbeck, University of London, breaks cuts through the suffocating foreign policy debate that shapes American Empire under Trump.
12 Jun 2018
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18 May 2018
Israel is massacring Palestinians daring to approach a fence that occupation forces have built to shore up an ethno-state founded on the principle of apartheid. Nothing could be more clear. But you wouldn’t no that...
13 Apr 2018
Historian and political theorist Timothy Mitchell joins Dan for the second of a two-part interview on his book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, published in 2011 by Verso. In part 1,...
10 Apr 2018
Historian and political theorist Timothy Mitchell joins Dan for the first of a two-part interview on his book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, published in 2011 by Verso. In this first episode,...
07 Apr 2018
It’s our 100th episode and the launch of our spring fundraising drive! Aziz Rana returns to The Dig 15 years after the invasion of Iraq to reflect on the paucity of substantive anti-imperialist politics across...
25 Mar 2018
Perhaps nothing has more defined the monstrosity of Donald Trump than his racist demonization and targeting of immigrants from Mexico, Muslim-majority countries and those nations he deems to be “shitholes” or, according to another account,...
14 Feb 2018
What if the Cold War only just ended in November 2016, as Donald Trump grotesquely encircled and then captured the presidency, finding it, to his surprise, unguarded? The Cold War proper, of course, ended with...
30 Jan 2018
We are living on land from which indigenous people, over hundreds of years, were violently removed. On some level, everyone knows this—yet it’s mostly nowhere to be found in stories that Americans tell themselves about...
16 Jan 2018
Martin Luther King Jr. launched the Poor People’s Campaign alongside other organizers shortly before he was assassinated 50 years ago. Today, organizers nationwide are relaunching that movement as The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call...
13 Jan 2018
Your first Diglet of the new year, and we’re talking about that Trump book. At n+1 Patrick Blanchfield makes the case that Fire and Fury is not, as some might think, a bunch of meaningless...
03 Jan 2018
The protest movement against the onset of the Iraq War was countered by a call to “support our troops” from militarists on the right. Venerating American soldiers, of course, is not about supporting actual American...
05 Dec 2017
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21 Nov 2017
Trump’s demagogic rhetoric on MS-13 is designed to obscure the truth about the reality and origins of mass Central American migration: the roots of migration from Central America lie in significant part in the violence...
31 Oct 2017
Rana overturns conventional accounts of American history, from settlement and Revolution to the Populists and the present day. In reality, settler-colonialism, empire, and a brutally exploitative economic system grounded in racial subjugation have always been...
26 Sep 2017
Islamophobia is conventionally regarded as racist and bigoted views about Muslims expressed by ignorant individuals, including the one who somehow became president. But legal and critical race scholar @KhaledBeydoun explains that the reality is more...
19 Sep 2017
Trump is normal in more ways than people care to admit, but he is different in that he parts from the bedrock ideology of American exceptionalism that has governed this country from its violent founding....
08 Sep 2017
Immigration law scholar @crimmigration breaks down the lies, misdirections and bigoted absurdities conveyed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions when he announced that the Trump Administration would cruelly make some 800,000 young people who came to...
22 Aug 2017
This is the war that never ends. The War on Terror’s permanence should be remarkable. It should be an outrage. But it is precisely because the war has become permanent that it has long since...
31 May 2017
Donald Trump won the presidency in significant part by pledging to do something that his predecessors had already mostly accomplished: building a big, beautiful wall on the border with Mexico. For liberals and centrists, the...
02 May 2017
The media has become a part of the story like perhaps never before. Journalist probing has irritated our touchy president. But media outlets have also played a role in Trump’s rise. During the campaign, cable...
10 Jan 2017
Presidents Bush and Obama both presided over an expansive War on Terror and a national security state with a lethal and global reach. Permanent war and warrantless snooping have become the bipartisan consensus backdrop of...