American Prestige

Fresh off his debut television appearance, Danny comes crawling back to Derek to receive The News. It is said Derek the Magnanimous received Danny with a warm embrace. This week: a new report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) confirms record high global arms spending (0:53), continued fighting in Sudan escalates ancillary effects on civilians (2:16), polls show a tightening race ahead of the Turkish election (10:26), Azerbaijan imposes a checkpoint near Karabakh (15:25), President Yoon of South Korea visits the US (18:35), and a Ukraine update on both the battlefield and the diplomatic front (25:28).

Recorded Thursday, April 27, 2023

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Danny and Derek welcome back Ken Klippenstein, investigative reporter for The Intercept, to discuss his two most recent articles detailing revelations in leaked Pentagon documents. The first concerns $36 million earmarked for research and treatment of everyone’s favorite new disease, Havana Syndrome. The second examines a DOD assessment of “the strategi…

Danny and Derek are joined by Juliet Lu, assistant professor at the University of British Columbia and co-host of The Belt and Road Podcast, to discuss, you guessed it: China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)! They get into China’s ideological vision for the project, the Sinophobia around it, how the project compares with non-Chinese institutions’ infrastructure development, the soft power angle, different populations’ reactions to Chinese-branded projects, the debt discourse, and more.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.americanprestigepod.com

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.americanprestigepod.com

Danny and Derek welcome Richard Maass, professor of political science at Old Dominion University, to discuss US annexation and his book The Picky Eagle: How Democracy and Xenophobia Limited U.S. Territorial Expansion . They discuss the importance of annexation in understanding contemporary US foreign policy, territorial expansion’s relation to class con…

Derek tolerates Producer Jake filling in for Danny, who was off filming his new action vehicle Hans Speier: Social Science Slaughter. This week: escalating conflicts in Sudan (1:50), a prisoner exchange in Yemen (10:00), a diplomatic free-for-all in the Middle East (13:27), an unprecedented heat wave hits Thailand (20:32), continuing grain shipment woes for Ukraine (23:03), and government-FARC peace talks set to begin in Colombia (28:31).

Recorded April 20, 2023

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.americanprestigepod.com

Danny and Derek welcome Adom Getachew, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago, and Jennifer Pitts, Professor of Political Science and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, to discuss their co-edited volume W.E.B. Du Bois: International Thought, a collection of essays and speeches by Du Bois engaging in empire and internationalism. They touch on the book’s relation to the discipline of international relations, Du Bois’ encounters with the international as a young man, his notion of the color line, the recurring theme of democratic despotism in his work, his evolving relationship to liberalism, his views on Liberia, Japan, and Russia, and more.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.americanprestigepod.com

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Danny and Derek welcome back Samuel Huneke, assistant professor of history at George Mason University, to discuss queer life in Germany from the 18th century through the Cold War. After setting the stage of the early Cold War period last episode, the crew delves further into queer life (in this discussion, gay men, gay women, and trans people) in the FR…

Our AI-generated Derek was working well until it kept insisting Danny’s name was “Darren” and that The Flat Earth was the news. On this spherical celestial body, however, we covered some other stories: Diplomatic progress in Saudi Arabia with Syria and Iran (0:50), peace talks in Yemen (5:30), the UN responds to the Taliban’s ban on female employees in Afghanistan (8:15), a new missile test from the DPRK (11:04), violence in Ethiopia’s Amhara region (13:01), Finland finally joins NATO (15:26), a New Cold War update featuring Emmanuel Macron in China (17:47), fallout from the recent document leak in the US (20:36), and a Ukraine update (24:43) featuring Seymour Hersh’s new piece (27:22).

*Note: US authorities have arrested the document leaker since the time of recording.

Recorded Thursday, April 13, 2023

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.americanprestigepod.com

Danny and Derek welcome Helen Benedict, novelist, author, and professor at the Columbia Journalism School, to discuss refugees in European camps and the refugee crisis in general. They get into the genesis of the book she co-authored, Map of Hope and Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece, which documents the experiences of refugees in one particular camp, working as a journalist vs. as a novelist, the US’s reputation as a bastion of human rights, the inherent colonialism of anthropology, the specific perils faced by women refugees, and more.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.americanprestigepod.com

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Danny and Derek welcome back Michael Brenes, associate director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and lecturer in history at Yale University, for the EXPLOSIVE conclusion to the history of the United States’ military-industrial complex (MIC). They pick up in the Reagan years, the transition from Cold War liberalism to neoconservativism, the…