Last month Adam Kirsch was on the show arguing that our current obsession with UFOs represents a new kind of religion. Today’s guest, the international relations expert Alexander Wendt, argues that today’s UFO obsession is the least of our problems. In his new book, The Last Humans (out today), Wendt’s worst-case scenario is that the UFOs are already here — and have been for some time.
While the Pentagon has conceded only that the objects are real and that it cannot identify them, Wendt extrapolates further. A recognition of the presence of UFOs would bring, he warns, both a crisis of global security and the demise of the traditional state system. Worst of all, he fears, would be a descent into a Hobbesian-style war-against-all.
Wendt is less worried about the invasion of the earth by little green men. If they had wanted to attack, he says, they would have done it when we fought with sticks rather than nukes. Instead, he worries about the social contract we have with the state. We obey the laws of the state because they keep us safe. Spacecraft that the Pentagon cannot identify, in airspace the Pentagon can’t defend, would leave that contract in tatters. What follows is not war with aliens but Hobbes’s great fear of a return to his dreaded state of nature.
So, as Wendt notes, “the threat of UFOs is not them. It’s actually us.” Rather than a new religion, they represent an old nightmare. Beam me up, Thomas Hobbes.
FIVE TAKEAWAYS
1. The danger is on our side of the encounter. He is not worried about invasion — anything able to get here could have destroyed us when we were weaker. He is worried that craft the Pentagon cannot identify or stop reveal a state that cannot protect anyone.
2. What he fears is Hobbes. Once the news is out people will disagree about what to do, and there is no way to settle it because nobody can get inside the craft. Disagreement with no arbiter is the problem the state was built to solve.
3. The title means three things. Last humans physically, if they exterminate us. Last biologically, if the hybridisation the abduction experiencers describe is real. Or last experientially — the last people to know what it was like to think we were alone.
4. Bad news for America: a country used to being on top has the furthest to fall. Possibly less bad for China, on the speculative grounds that a collectivist culture has more cohesion to spend on a shock like this.
5. The UFOs are the occasion; the argument is constructivist. His 1992 article said the international system has no single logic and everything depends on what states make of it. This is that claim applied to the strangest case available.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Alexander Wendt is Mershon Professor of International Security and Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, and a founder of the constructivist school of international relations. He is the author of Social Theory of International Politics and of the 1992 article "Anarchy Is What States Make of It". In the 2017 TRIP survey his peers named him the most influential scholar in international relations of the previous twenty years. He shared the 2023 Skytte Prize in Political Science and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2025. The Last Humans is published by Oxford University Press.
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States, hosted by Andrew Keen, author of The Internet Is Not the Answer and How to Fix the Future. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
00:31 — Adam Kirsch and UFOs as a new religion
02:19 — Not religion — a scientific and military imperative
03:43 — Separating UFOs from ETs
06:33 — The threat is not them, it’s us
08:00 — Hobbes, disagreement and violence
08:54 — Could a common threat unite us instead?
10:25 — Two scenarios: cooperation or a new arms race
11:25 — What happens to the United Nations
13:01 — The parallel with AI
18:28 — Conspiracy theory in a conspiratorial age
21:00 — Why the Pentagon changed its mind after seventy-five years
22:32 — The three senses of the last humans
26:37 — Realists, liberals and constructivists
29:30 — Anarchy Is What States Make of It