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Radio War Nerd EP #636 — Imperialist Realism, feat. Daniel Bessner + The War Nerd Updates (Patreon)

Published:
2026-09-20 15:39:15
Imported:
2026-09
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Guest: Daniel Bessner Recorded: September 15, 2026

Danny Bessner of the American Prestige podcast discusses Imperialist Realism: Politics and Culture at the End of the American Century, his new collection of essays. And the War Nerd returns to update us on his -oscopies & Ansarallah's sweep through southwest Yemen.

First - John joins to update us on his internal battles, and to discuss Houthi-Saudi relations and the strange story of the Salafist school in the Houthi heartlandAt 38:20 - Music interlude by Brendon Anderegg. Check out music from his group Mountains hereAt 40:55 - Danny Bessner joins to discuss Imperialist Realism

Buy Danny's book Imperialist Realism: Politics and Culture at the End of the American Century. Subscribe to Danny's new substack Imperialist Realism. Also check out American Prestige co-hosted by Derek Davison.

Total time: 1:47:46Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

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John's new essay collection, To The Crows, is available to subscribers. You can also order a hard copy on Amazon - read it, know it, review it!

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

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Comments

Jack Ross

Like a seasonal bird John flies back to us

Alex Payne

Ayy next to the Chapo boys, the American Prestige guys are my favorite to see joining y'all 🙌

CR

You guys didn’t get general anesthesia for colonoscopies or endoscopies? You guys love to live life on Expert Mode.

Hugh Jazz

Awesome to hear John out of the shop and fully operational again

rolfesam

Beautiful interlude music

ben s

re the video games: I always thought an interesting aspect of these games is that in the multiplayer mode you get to choose between playing as the Americans or the nazis, Vietcong, etc. or in the case of counter strike “terrorists vs counterterrorists.” And aside from some small differences in the load out, your teams are essentially equally matched and especially in counterstrike there is no sense of the ideology of either side and no sense of the asymmetrical nature of what these wars actually look like (a small team of well positioned Terrorists plant bombs, and a small team of well positioned counter terrorists attempt to defuse them). The “middle eastern set level “dust” are the best and most commonly played by a large margin. Anyway, the player is almost never asked to consider any context or make any real decisions about their team beyond wanting to use an ak47 or an m16. It’s been at least 15 years since I played any of these so I’m sure there’s new developments since then.

parker

They actually removed alot of the context from CS that was there. Before terrorist models either called to specific groups or had some influence from real life groups that generally can be considered uncontroversially terror groups except maybe the hamas ones. Hamas i think you can label as armed resistance and a rebel group because terrorism implies terror is there main weapon and in dust it is implied to be them in csgo. However valve removed most models from the game basically from the default so everyone uses i think the french gign models and the eastern European models that are extremely vague on who they even are. For example the game used to have models that had basque images and insignia for the spanish maps.

ben s

Out of the breakfast buffet and into the gastroenterologists

Alec

See? He’s not dead you doofus

GoyBulletStopper

You talk about Yemens Autonomy, yet still refer to them as "Houthis". Come on boys.

drizzly_november

I was just reading about hudsonian godwits that fly from Chile to Alaska to breed. Apparently they’re able to shrink their internal organs to take on more body fat in preparation for the grueling trek. Birds are pretty cool.

drizzly_november

It must be ages since I last played because I definitely remember the terrorists on Inferno wearing ETA masks and berets.

Sam Inman

I had to do a double take when I heard Danny talk about the World war series by Harry Turtledove 😂 his books are a guilty pleasure for me especially that series. Please do an episode on them and maybe the Timeline 191 aka the Southern Victory series. It starts when the South wins the Civil War at the battle of Antietam or however you spell it going into the 20th century into WW1 and WW2

Lojban Chauvinist

Denying the necessity of power vacuums is very interesting. I wish we could have heard Bessner's argument there

Lojban Chauvinist

Bessner at 1:34:03: "You don't get the supporting of the just war without, almost immediately after, a year and a half later, Gaza. And so, I think the soft, liberal humanitarianism is just an evidence of shallow thinking, and that the purpose of a progressive movement should be to remove the military power. [...] So, that, to me, should be the quote-unquote 'Left' position, but, you know, it's going to take a lot of organizing and a lot of education and a lot of advocacy for that to become the thing, because people often just default to empire; because it's been a 'true fact,' as they say, of American life for so long." For an anti-imperialist thinker who wants to grapple with power in the real world, 90 percent of your work will be persuading Westerners that disarmament can be in their interests. I don't see anyone really seriously doing this, because it's obvious that then you'd have to go up against widely held intuitions, backed up by many theories of imperialism (both anti- and pro-, Marxist and other), which tell the Average American that yes, despite whatever problems they have with Israel, American global power is a necessary condition of prosperity (i.e. superprofits) at home. Trump wants a more limited imperialism — a compromise that could be very popular with the American working class. But imagine selling the American populace on REAL anti-imperialism, meaning giving up our stranglehold over oil, natural resources, trade routes, and global finance. How are you going to do that if — as you should — you hold a materialist, interest-based theory of politics?

AMP

really beautiful music

ben s

Oh I don’t remember that but I do remember the terrorists in dust looking cool with their sunglasses

Doug Cartel

Action for it's own sake is fucking insane but it makes sense to someone who has abandoned emotions and thinks purely in rational (insane) terms

Doug Cartel

In a way it's a perversion of "Action is the driver of history"

Maggie+Al

The funniest part of the whole turtledove thing is Inspite of what you would assume based on the premise of any of his novels he's a massive resist lib

T

Propafol was the best part of my colonoscopy

a clash of purple

It can't be done in a vacuum. But in the context of a collapsing empire and stiffening resistance from the periphery, that argument can be a lot more compelling. It's not "Please accept a lower standard of living so that other human beings can have a higher standard of living," it's "Our position as global hegemon is untenable, how many of our children will you demand to die before you accept reality?" Change only becomes possible once external factors alter the material basis upon which the current consensus is built.

GC

:)

.

"And I am not saying I won't fight anymore, indeed. I am saying that I don't want war anymore. I want the end of the siege. You walk to the beach at sunset, and you see all these teenagers on the shore chatting and wondering what the world looks like across the sea. What life looks like. It's breaking. And should break everybody. I want them free." - Schwarzkommando

Wm

Can somebody please reduce Danny’s Adderall dose? He talks so fast I can’t keep up. It’s giving me anxiety to listen to him.

Schaeffer Mallory

Amazing episode!! I have a distinct memory of whichever early days episode it was where Mark just had a colonoscopy. Good shit. Revolutionary defeatism is the only path forward!!!

Schaeffer Mallory

I really think the only option out of imperialism is if we somehow have an all out war that doesn't go nuclear. I think any such war would be so disastrous for the US that it would be forced - either internally or externally - to essentially disarm at the end of it. Alas nukes

David Bond

Our cup runneth over

Benjamin Button

John Dolan walking in the studio a full two inches taller after his leg lengthening surgery

ben s

The lower standard of living is already the reality for so many people in America. I think you need to tie it to a mass political project that explicitly paints a different way of life that takes us out of the individualist death spiral. This has largely been a project of anarchists and cults. Hopefully some serious organized left party can emerge and chart a path forward. So depressing to be writing this when 10 years ago it seemed possible (if only remotely) that Bernie was actually going to lead to some real alternative.

Benj

I slowed it down on the app for the bike commute

Miguel Duarte

Great episode - I also listen to American Prestige so I am very familiar with Bessner-thought. And while I mostly agree with him, I find his pessimism of left political potential very frustrating and sometimes misinformed. There are indeed sections of the organized left who are grappling w/ the questions empire and working towards synthesizing a 21st century anti-imperialist politics. But it is true that much of the existing organized left still operates within a Cold War-era framework that can be called "campist" with varying degrees of fairness depending on the actual argument being made. This "campist" vs. "non-campist" debate has characterized the DSA's International Committee since DSA's revival in 2016. The socialist anti-imperialist argument, in my opinion, consists of two parts. The first is a reclamation / reconstruction of the humanism at the core of socialist thought, to serve as a moral and ideological lodestar, emphasizing the inherent goodness and necessity of peace and collaboration, especially in the face of climate change. The second part is a hard-nosed domestic retail politics that emphasizes that war abroad means poverty at home. This politics will have to contend with the fact that the MIC is a large employer in certain areas; that the MIC is structural and load-bearing to portions of the economy. But this is the politics that must be developed - it is the task of our time, and contrary to Bessner, there are sections of the left working on this issue. It's only a matter of time before this intellectual and organizing work becomes more visible.

Miguel Duarte

While I appreciate and agree with the role "revolutionary defeatism" as a concept played during WWI, it does not translate well to today's context. Creating a viable 21st c. anti-imperial politics requires shedding these slogans and re-contextualizing their core ideas into new slogans.

adrenochromatic

The difference between "kleptocratic" and "oligarchic" capitalism is "Russia"/"America"?

Terry Dunk

that was some real polisci pablum

Thomas Svennungson

Ames mention theyve had some episode with war game developers, anyone know which episode he’s referring to?

Nathan Fleming

does anyone have this clip of John raging at the cod tutorial mission

Vodka Grinch

Canceling Danny on RWN for clavicular fandom

Patrick Fitzgerald

Really digging John's new book. The AUIS stuff is painfully good. And the progression of the ex-gf who goes from Noraid fellow traveler to HTS overseer is wild. Fair too. Worth the price of a War Nerd subscription.

William

Think Tankers is a great name for these freaks, because they imagine themselves having much more armor than they actually do

William

Houthi Yemen —- Vietnam — imperial ass kicker world champs since 1700

Quinn

I wouldnt say it's the only option but agreed it's the easiest and most straightforward to actually imagine. I don't think it's even that implausible to happen without nukes, it would just need to happen with a war with a non-nuclear regional power. The military hardware gap was always overblown anyway but Iran effectively contesting US air and naval power is huge. It's not THAT hard to imagine a disastrous attempt at ground invasion that quickly spirals into 10,000 casualties in a year, and I think you're right that could push the US over the brink. Over the brink into what is a scary thought in itself but somethings gotta give

Quinn

Yeah as much as I'm personally cynical and discouraged I don't think the cynicism reflects the reality of left politics in the US. Whenever I'm active and involved with real people on the ground I am almost always more encouraged. There's a lot more maturity and better priorities than there was 10 years ago, which might not be saying much considering the left circa 2016, but let's give ourselves some credit that US socialism had to start from less than 0 with no infrastructure, generations of contempt and propaganda against it, and within institutions and environments built to varying extents to discourage and suppress it. I'm certainly not "optimistic" exactly but I think pessimism is unjustified. I started getting involved in socialist organizing a couple years before Bernies first campaign and the amount of change in every part of what that has looked like is difficult to overstate.

Sam Inman

Yea same here. Started reading him when I was 14 and when I moved to a new state a few years ago I saw all of the Timeline 191 books at a discount book store and reread them all then tracked down the World War series. I noticed he reuses the same lines a lot of the time and his writing could def be better but if I see he has a new book out I’m grabbing it lmao

xnfec

I remember seeing Madelaine Albright quoted as saying to Colin Powell something to the effect of what is the point of having this wonderful military you are always going on about if we never use it. Also, I recall Harry Turtledove being mentioned many moons ago in your interview with the guy from the Ashville Blade about science fiction. I inferred a certain degree of eye rolling was occurring - it was to do with civil war revisionism as I recall. Lastly, your mentioning of Cobain and Washington state reminded me of the episode with Matthew Randazzo V. That was a really intersting episode. Any chance of having him back?

Quinn Tucker

Turtledove is a guilty pleasure of mine. I cant stand the absolute braindead anticommunism that permeates so much of his work though. Id love some bullshit alt history trash that takes seriously the idea that commies are people with motivations that can be understood

Quinn Tucker

Im not sure how anyone would assume otherwise after reading his work lol. Hes an anticommunist wehraboo philosemite pop history guy that isnt racist. Of course hes a lib

Quinn Tucker

Dont get me wrong I love a lot of his work but he is also a huge fucking hack that makes some of the most tedious and repetative garbage known to man. Id say at least 15% of the southern victory series is repeating that southern tobacco is good and northern tobacco is bad, the hot war series is just mindnumbingly stupid and boring that its honestly impressive he could make such a concept SO uninteresting . same with the early war series, started out promising but good lord he just does nothing at all intriguing or worthwhile with it. Guns of the south is just fun though, my favorite book of his (weirdly) is the case of the toxic spell dump. Its a ton of fun, a great concept with wonderful worldbuilding that has some of the most bizarre, brainrotted political/cultural undercurrents that make it strangely fascinating. So much to unpack in that one

Quinn Tucker

Worldwar series is a middle ground for me cause as dissapointing and straight up stupid the story is relative to what it could have been it also has INSANE psychosexual baggage that makes up for inanity

Quinn Tucker

God and dont get me started on fucking bugs bunny otto skorzeny

Quinn Tucker

Who'd have thought by the end of the series maybe the primary plotline is about teenagers fucking in space

Dave Currie

Away with the Patupaiarehe (Māori fairies)

radiowarnerd

Need to check in on Matthew. That was an interesting interview.