Latest Taliban Podcast Episodes
The Unruly and Not-So-Orderly Rules-based International Order
Foreign Podicy - January 21, 2022 22:05 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsJohn Bolton has had quite a few challenging jobs. Among them: presidential national security advisor, ambassador to the United Nations, and several senior positions in the State Department. He has an original and provocative new essay in National Review on the so-called “rules-based internationa...
Biden’s Moment of Truth in Iran
Foreign Podicy - January 14, 2022 23:05 - 39 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsNegotiations between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran have not gone well. President Biden may soon have to choose between two unappealing options: allowing the theocratic regime to become a nuclear-weapons power or using military force to prevent that outcome. Mark Dubowitz, F...
H.R. McMaster, the Warrior Ethos, and the Wars Against the West
Foreign Podicy - January 07, 2022 22:30 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsLt. Gen. (Ret.) H.R. McMaster is a soldier and a scholar and, these days, a commentator – one might even say a pundit. His recent essay for National Review is titled: “Preserving the Warrior Ethos” – a contrarian theme in an age where the dominant culture valorizes victims and too many politica...
Chinese Communism 101: Beijing’s Campus Strategy
Foreign Podicy - December 24, 2021 23:24 - 46 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsIn recent years, it’s become apparent that the People’s Republic of China intends to eat America’s lunch. No one is more responsible for revealing that than Matthew Pottinger, a former journalist who went on to earn an honest living serving in the U.S. Marines, and, in the previous administratio...
Biden’s Democracy Summitry
Foreign Podicy - December 17, 2021 18:00 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsOn December 9th and 10th, President Biden hosted what he called the Summit for Democracy – a virtual conference to which he invited 110 governments. Three principal items on the agenda: defending against authoritarianism, fighting corruption, and advancing human rights. Did this “summit” make a...
Strategic Surprise: A Conversation on Nuclear and Missile Threats with Rep. Mike Turner
Foreign Podicy - December 01, 2021 18:09 - 49 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsThe People’s Republic of China recently tested an advanced new hypersonic glide vehicle that circles the Earth and is designed to evade U.S. defenses and conduct a nuclear attack against the American homeland. A new Pentagon report reveals that Beijing is expanding the size of its nuclear arsen...
King George, America‘s Founders, and the World Shaped by Both
Foreign Podicy - November 19, 2021 18:00 - 55 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsAndrew Roberts has been described as one of Britain’s greatest historians. That’s not true. He’s one of the world’s greatest historians, as his biographies of Napoleon, and Churchill – along with a long list of other significant books – have made clear. His new book: The Last King of America: Th...
Willful Blindness: Revisiting the 2021 Gaza War
Foreign Podicy - October 29, 2021 15:00 - 49 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsIn 2005, Israelis withdrew from Gaza – every soldier, every farmer, every synagogue, every grave. It was an historic land-for-peace experiment – and it failed. In May, Hamas began firing missiles at Israeli cities, towns, and villages, sparking the fourth intense armed conflict since Hamas defe...
The U.S. Rejoins the UN’s Human Rights Violators Club
Foreign Podicy - October 25, 2021 07:30 - 49 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsIf the United Nations Human Rights Council were a figment of George Orwell’s imagination, you’d probably say: “Okay, very entertaining but, even accounting for dramatic license, this is a bit over the top.” The UNHRC is a club for many of the world’s worst and most chronic violators of human ri...
Israel’s Shield in the Sky
Foreign Podicy - October 15, 2021 19:13 - 47 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsIn May, Hamas leaders in Gaza — a territory from which Israelis withdrew in 2005 — launched more than 4,000 missiles at Israel, sparking an eleven-day conflict that would have been bloodier — on both sides — had the Israelis not been in possession of the Iron Dome, a marvel of engineering that i...
The UN’s Strange Obsession with Israel
Foreign Podicy - September 17, 2021 21:24 - 48 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsAn extraordinary number of organizations within the UN system spend most of their time, money, and energy demonizing and attempting to de-legitimize Israel — and claiming to defend Palestinians. Joining Foreign Podicy host Cliff May to talk about UNIFIL, UNRWA, the UNHRC, and several other org...
Nuclear and Chemical Watchdogs or Lapdogs?
Foreign Podicy - September 10, 2021 19:21 - 47 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsBack in 1957, the same year the Soviets put Sputnik — the world’s first artificial satellite — into orbit, and Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up” hit the top of the Billboard charts, the UN established the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The goal was to promote peaceful uses of atomic en...
The U.N. Record on Health, Human Rights, Trade, and Communications is Worse Than You Think
Foreign Podicy - September 03, 2021 15:00 - 58 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsThere are dozens of international organizations affiliated with the United Nations. Some do useful work. Those that do not are under no pressure to improve. As for those that do harm: They pretty much enjoy impunity. Republican and Democratic administrations alike have preferred to leave not-w...
Jewish Germans and German Jews
Foreign Podicy - August 27, 2021 15:00 - 33 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsJews have lived in the lands we now call Germany for a rather long time. They first arrived in the 4th century under the Roman Emperor Constantine. By the end of the 19th century, there were about 500,000 German Jews – or Jewish Germans. Though less than one percent of the population, a signifi...
Israel, Post-Bibi
Foreign Podicy - August 13, 2021 15:01 - 58 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsFor the past 12 years, Benjamin Netanyahu served as Israel’s prime minister, fighting wars and wars-between-wars against Hamas and Hezbollah; opposing President Obama’s attempts to propitiate Iran’s rulers who openly threaten Israelis with genocide; attempting to block blows from the United Nati...
The Predators Threatening Africa
Foreign Podicy - July 23, 2021 18:14 - 52 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsAfrica is a large and diverse continent. Many different peoples, ethnic groups, tribes — these terms overlap but are not synonymous — speaking more than a thousand languages, organized into more than 50 nation-states. Most of those nation-states achieved independence in the aftermath of World W...
The UN System: What Went Wrong and What Should Be Done
Foreign Podicy - July 09, 2021 17:05 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsThe U.N. and other international organizations were designed to give structure to what we like to call the “international community” – establishing and expressing what we like to call “international laws” and “international norms.” Over recent years, however, authoritarian regimes have been inc...
Raisi Rising
Foreign Podicy - June 24, 2021 19:05 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsAn election – of sorts – was held in the Islamic Republic of Iran last week. The victor: Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline theocrat who has been sanctioned by the US for his involvement in the mass execution of political prisoners. Voter turnout was reportedly low. To discuss these developments, and h...
Tehran’s Nuclear Secrets
Foreign Podicy - June 15, 2021 22:01 - 57 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsDavid Albright is a physicist, a former nuclear inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency, an expert on nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation, and the founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security – also known as “the Good ISIS.” His important new ...
Eleven Days in May: The Latest Battle in the Long War Against Israel
Foreign Podicy - May 28, 2021 16:45 - 48 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsThe Islamic Republic of Iran provides Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad with rockets and other weapons, technology, training, and funding. Over 11 days in May, the two groups fired more than four thousand rockets at Israeli cities and villages. President Biden supported Israel’s right to defe...
Biden’s Mission to Realign the Middle East
Foreign Podicy - May 14, 2021 21:57 - 50 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsPresident Biden has been eager to rejoin the deal that President Obama concluded with Iran’s rulers in 2015 and from which President Trump withdrew three years later. The quarrel between advocates for, and critics of, the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) has been viewed as a...
The Middle East Muddle
Foreign Podicy - May 10, 2021 21:21 - 56 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsHere’s a riddle for you: Name something Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden have in common? Here's one answer: None has appeared to understand the theological premises that motivate such groups as al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Islamic State — nor those that drive the rulers of the Islamic Republ...
Palestinians Head for the Polls – or Not
Foreign Podicy - April 27, 2021 13:00 - 48 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsIn the West Bank and Gaza, elections are not frequent occurrences. The last one was in 2006. Hamas, a terrorist organization opposed to a two-state solution and openly committed to Israel’s extermination, won a parliamentary majority. A Palestinian civil war followed. A year later, Hamas ruled ...
Beijing, the WHO, and the Pandemic
Foreign Podicy - April 16, 2021 15:00 - 42 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsIn January, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on the World Health Organization to fully investigate the possibility that the COVID-19 virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. He cited new U.S. intelligence that raises troubling questions. But China’s rulers have not been forthcoming. ...
Putin vs. the Press
Foreign Podicy - April 09, 2021 20:30 - 36 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsIn the Soviet Union, all media were controlled by the state, and foreign correspondents were severely restricted. Those who hoped — and perhaps believed — that freedom of speech and freedom of the press would be guaranteed to the people of post-Soviet Russia have been disappointed. Not least, t...
The Thin Red Line: Joby Warrick on the U.S. Response to this Century’s Worst War Crimes
Foreign Podicy - March 19, 2021 20:23 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsJoby Warrick is a distinguished journalist, a longtime Washington Post national security reporter, and a Pulitzer Prize-winner. His latest book is: “Red Line: The Unraveling of Syria and America’s Race to Destroy the Most Dangerous Arsenal in the World.” To discuss Bashar al-Assad’s use of chem...
The UN and the Illiberal International Order
Foreign Podicy - February 26, 2021 22:41 - 47 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsWith the defeat of the Axis Powers in 1945, the United States emerged as the strongest nation on earth. But rather than emulate hegemons of the past, American leaders envisioned a new and different world order. Their goal was to organize an "international community," establish "universal human ...
Iran’s Road from Monarchy to Islamist Theocracy and Empire
Foreign Podicy - February 11, 2021 16:00 - 52 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsFebruary 11, 2021 is the forty-second anniversary of the revolution that transformed Iran from a Western-aligned monarchy to an anti-Western Islamist theocracy. Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, one of America’s leading analysts of contemporary Iran, and the aut...
Thinking Bigly at Foggy Bottom
Foreign Podicy - January 29, 2021 16:00 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsStarting in 2019, and until the recent change of administration, Peter Berkowitz served as director of Policy Planning at the State Department. That’s the government ideas shop that George Kennan established in 1947. Dr. Berkowitz was an unusual choice for this job in that his background is sch...
Arms Control and the Man
Foreign Podicy - December 22, 2020 22:49 - 49 minutes ★★★★★ - 142 ratingsMarshall Billingslea has worked on a range of significant and difficult national security issues. He served as Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing at the Treasury Department, president of the international Financial Action Task Force, Deputy Under Secretary of the Navy, Principal Deputy...
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