Eric welcomes back Eliot to host Stephen Sestanovich, the George F. Kennan Senior Fellow for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the Council on Foreign Relations and Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor at the School of International Political Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University to discuss the short-lived semi-farcical mutiny in Russia led by Evgeniy Prigozhin, the proprietor of the Wagner Group private military company. They discuss the backstory of Wagner and the legal limbo in which it operates, how its business model benefits members of Putin’s kleptocratic elite, whether Putin has emerged weaker or stronger from this affair and the impact that Prigozhin’s actions may have on the stability of Russia and the ongoing war effort on Ukraine.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/three-logics-russias-prigozhin-putsch/674538/
https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/110854/witnesses/HHRG-116-FA14-Wstate-MartenK-20200707.pdf
Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Email us with your feedback at shieldoftherepublic@gmail.com
 
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Give Me the Gun Big Guy

Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. We probe beyond the hive mind of Washington conventional wisdom on national security and foreign affairs.

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Eric welcomes Eliot back from scenic Lake Champlain where Eliot communed with the spirit of Benedict Arnold. They host Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security and Ambassador (ret.) Robert Blackwill, the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. They discuss Fontaine and Blackwell's new book Lost Decade: The U.S. Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024). They review the origins and history of "The Pivot" to Asia during the Obama Administration, the reasons that this rebalancing of U.S. power and policy to the East was not implemented, the various efforts to do so subsequently and the reasons that they too did not succeed, the trade-offs among U.S. responsibilities for security in Europe and the Middle East and re-orienting to the Indo-Pacific, the need for a substantial increase in defense spending, the lack of a real trade policy for East Asia, the balance between diplomacy and deterrence and whether or not productive diplomacy with an autocratic regime and leader like Xi Jinping is even possible.



https://a.co/d/3VvFaeh



Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

The Fallout From a Lost Decade

Eric hosts New York Times Chief Washington Correspondent David Sanger, author of The Inheritance, Confront and Conceal, The Perfect Weapon and most recently New Cold Wars:  China's Rise, Russia's Invasion and America's Struggle to Defend the West. They discuss the underlying assumptions that led American policymakers to underestimate the rise and threat of great power competition, whether hawks or doves have been more correct in analyzing the course of events over the past 15 years, the tensions, both past and present, in the Biden-Zelensky relationship, the Biden Administration's efforts at "escalation management" during the war in Ukraine, Russian nuclear threats and how seriously to take them, the question of whether the US and China have been engaged in an action-reaction spiral of distrust or whether Chinese actions have unfolded against a backdrop of American complacency, the unprecedented challenge of deterring two nuclear peers and the Biden Administration's Iran policy which seems to be on autopilot.



New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West: https://a.co/d/9nTIoD3



Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

David Sanger on the New Cold Wars

Eric and Eliot ruminate on the past 100 episodes of Shield of the Republic looking back retrospectively on big takeaways about US national security since the show began in September 2021 in the shadow of the catastrophic US withdrawal from Afghanistan. They talk about President Biden's limitations as a communicator and the broader difficulties of communicating a coherent strategic message in our current fractionated media and information ecosystem. They discuss the bandwidth difficulties for any American administration's dealing with more than one and a half crises at a time and the specific problem of dealing with Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the war in Gaza at the same time and touch on the issues left unaddressed -- like having a policy to deal with Iran's growing stock of low enriched uranium at the 60% level. They contrast the troubles on campus today with the university upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the decline of the academic discipline of history and the catastrophic collapse in history enrollments in Universities. They discuss Eliot's article in Foreign Affairs on a theory of victory for Ukraine and the dangers of a Trump election victory as well as the necessity of loosening the US (and German) imposed restrictions on the use of weapons by Ukraine against legitimate military and logistical targets inside Russia.



https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/theory-victory-ukraine



https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/university-gaza-protests-squirm/678437/



https://www.thebulwark.com/p/ukraine-cant-win-if-it-cant-shoot?utm_source=profile&utm;_medium=reader2



Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Shield of the Republic Crosses the Century Mark

Eliot returns from the Lennert Meri Conference in Tallinn, Estonia and he and Eric are joined by Bret Stephens, columnist for the New York Times, founding Editor-in-Chief of SAPIR: A Journal of Jewish Conversation, former Editor in Chief of the Jerusalem Post, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary at the Wall Street Journal and author of America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder, (New York:  Sentinel, 2014). They discuss the war in Gaza, Israel's apparent lack of a strategy, the ICC decision to seek warrants for PM Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant for war crimes, the anti-Israel bias of the UN system, the spread of anti-semitism on campus and beyond, the return of isolationism of both the left and the right, the prospects for this fall's election and the political failures of the Biden Administration, and the prospects for American resilience in the face of all this darkness.



Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Israel's Current & Future Conundrum

Eric hosts Dale Copeland, Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics at UVA and faculty senior fellow at the Miller Center. Dale is the author of A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China, (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2024). They discuss Dale's dynamic realist theory of international relations which seeks to meld "offensive realism" which sees states as power maximizing entities in an anarchic world and "defensive realism" which sees states as acting to modulate power maximizing in order to avoid a spiral into conflict. Dale contrasts this theory to liberal institutional theories that see foreign policies as driven by internal dynamics including ideology. They discuss his account of American foreign policy which sees US statesmen as successful practitioners of realpolitik in a way that has advanced the U.S. national interest and created what Dale calls the "FDR legacy" or the liberal international order over which the U.S. has presided since the end of World War II. They talk about analysts who are either China "pessimists" who believe a conflict between the U.S. and China is unavoidable and China "optimists" who think it may be possible to avoid conflict. They discuss China's tightening relations with Russia, whether or not the U.S.-China relationship will be a bipolar one, whether or not we have seen "peak China," Xi's recent trip to Europe, how one would know enough to conclude that China was a threat that require containment and much more about the U.S.-China relationship.



A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China:

https://a.co/d/8GWjZVd



Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

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