Departures with Robert Amsterdam

This week we are beyond thrilled to have Mahmood Mamdani on the podcast, one of the world's most highly regarded public intellectuals, author of dozens of books, and a decorated professor at Columbia University. Dr. Mamdani has had diverse life experience, from marching on Birmingham for civil rights to being chased from Kampala by the Idi Amin regime to fighting apartheid in South Africa, and in his new book, "Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities," he explores the decolonization of justice and the separation between national identity and culture and state power.

As competition in the field of cyberwarfare heats up between Russia and the United States, there are few other experts with more experience working inside the Central Intelligence Agency than Jack Devine.

For 32 years Devine worked as a US spymaster, serving as Acting Director and Associate Director of CIA's operations outside the United States from 1993-1995, where he had supervisory authority over thousands of CIA employees involved in sensitive missions throughout the world. In addition, he served as Chief of the Latin American Division from 1992-1993 and was the principal manager of the CIA's sensitive projects in Latin America.

Devine's new book, "Spymaster's Prism: The Fight Against Russian Aggression," explores a number of major espionage incidents which have taken place between the two nations since the end of World War II, and what lessons can be drawn to prepare for the next phase of competition in the clandestine services.

The inside anecdotes alone make this book an exciting read, and Devine presents his highly unique perspective with detail and fascinating historical context from his own personal involvement in the service.

When a government wants to break into someone's iPhone or Android device, there's a marketplace where that kind of vulnerability hacking service is bought and sold - costing sometimes as much as $2.5 million.

The very fact that such a marketplace exists for cyberwarfare is an illustration of the rapidly growing field of threats we face, and also a sign of how dramatically unprepared we are to defend against these attacks. From the SolarWinds hack in 2020 which was one of the largest breaches of sensitive government data to the more recent attacks on small municipal water plants, utilities, and pipelines, there is an expanding intensity of the sophistication of cyber weapons and the United States is rapidly falling way behind the curve.

Nicole Perlroth, the award-winning New York Times journalist, joins the podcast to discuss her excellent book, "This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race," a stunning work of investigative journalism spanning seven years of detailed research and interviews.

According to Perlroth, the United States has an extremely soft underbelly of connected infrastructure which has profound exposures and no system of defense. Meanwhile, Russia is conducting targeted testing of its cyberwarfare tools all over the world, preparing for a future event. The NSA can perfect its offensive cyber-weaponry all it wants, she says, but currently there is still very little planning to prepare for the coming war.

Whether or not the United States will respond in time to these threats and develop defenses is going to have a major impact on our future security.

Imagine you are trapped in a far-flung foreign compound with 10 other people, none of them want to be there, but you have a seemingly limitless supply of alcohol. Oh, and you are charged with developing critical intelligence and knowledge for Imperial Russia's ambitions to gain global power.

That's among the many fascinating stories in Gregory Afinogenov's new book, "Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia's Quest for World Power," which explores how knowledge about Asia was developed from the 17th to the 19th centuries.

What's interesting about this unique period of history that Afinogenov writes about is how espionage was used as a means of generating knowledge for public intellectuals, helping Imperial Russia to compete with rival Britain, to advance a deeper knowledge of the East - but this information, filtered and passed through Moscow, rarely met its goal and often did not get distributed inside Russia itself, shaping future relations with China in various ways.

Afinogenov argues that we should take a critical look at the assumptions that connect knowledge regimes with imperial power, and how this neglected intellectual history offers insight and value to historians.

For decades, academics and journalists have struggled to explain Russia by attempting to better explain Vladimir Putin, endlessly debating his background, his personal character, and his thinking. Many of them argue that his personal power is at the heart of decision-making, that his will alone drives events. And we couldn't be more wrong.

Timothy Frye, a professor of political science at Columbia University, has had decades of experience working on the ground in Russia, and brings together these anecdotes of his experiences along with academic research to present a new argument: that's there's nothing particularly special about Vladimir Putin to set him apart from numerous other authoritarian leaders. His power is in fact quite constrained, consisting of a complex series of trade-offs and difficult decisions made more challenging by his low popularity and the responsiveness of the government to public pressure.

Speaking about his new book "Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia" in this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Frye offers a fresh perspective on the traditional debates over Russia, emphasizing that we should understand the system and how it works instead of the individual.

From the first election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1998 to the death of Fidel Castro in Cuba in 2016, Latin America experienced a vast "pink tide" of left-leaning leaders often described as populist.

And while it would be a mistake to consider all these diverse personalities and governments under a single banner, it would also be a mistake to ignore some similar systemic undercurrents and driving factors behind this period of populism in Latin America, argues Will Grant, a BBC reporter and author of the new book "Populista: The Rise of Latin America's 21st Century Strongman."

Speaking in this interview with Robert Amsterdam, Grant explores how populism became the most important political movement in the Western Hemisphere in the 21st century, and then how that idealism came crashing down, leaving Latin America in the grips of some of the most authoritarian and dangerous leaders since the military dictatorships of the 1970s.

In light of the escalating violence taking place in Israel this week, we reached out to our friend and colleague Ron Robin, a scholar, author, and the President of Haifa University.

In this brief interview, which was interrupted at several points by air raid sirens nearby Prof. Robin's location, we discuss the origins of the political violence we are seeing, the end of Benjamin Netanyahu's political career, and the potential impact of the Abraham Accords and other diplomatic forces - including Russia - which may provide for the resolution and management of tensions in Gaza.

Near the end of this episode, host of the Departures podcast Robert Amsterdam tells his guest, "This is perhaps the best book I've ever read on Africa, and I've read a lot of books."

Such is the esteem we hold for Michela Wrong, a British journalist who has covered Africa for decades for outlets such as the BBC and the Financial Times. Her latest book, "Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad," tells the inside story of the authoritarian regime of President Paul Kagame in Rwanda through the lens of one specific murder case - the 2013 killing of Patrick Karegeya, the former head of external intelligence, and extrapolating that investigation to reveal so much more about the country and the region.

Wrong's book also serves as a sledgehammer to a number of myths that tend to be held up about Rwanda - not just the enormous chasm between its darling status among donor organizations and its reality as an apartheid state, but also crucial facts about Hutu victims of the genocide, the shooting down of the 1994 flight carrying the then-presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, and the "potemkin village" aspect of Rwanda's economic transformation.

In April 2013, in a distant corner of Nigeria, a terrorist group kidnapped some 300 schoolgirls, eventually igniting a global advocacy campaign that brought an unprecedented level of international attention to the country. This global attention, which involved interventions by Western intelligence agencies, military advisors, and a plethora of aid NGOs, has not necessarily always resulted in success.

The Wall Street Journal reporter Drew Hinshaw, along with his co-author Joe Parkinson, has published a fascinating deep dive into this incident under the title "Bring Back Our Girls: The Untold Story of the Global Search for Nigeria's Missing Schoolgirls."

Hinshaw and Parkinson write that the kidnapping of Chibok girls represented "not just a story about a remote tragedy-stricken town in Nigeria, but a parable and perhaps a cautionary tale about the flawed interconnected workings of our butterfly's-wings world."

In recent years, China has gradually transitioned from a "quiet rise" strategy under Hu Jintao to the "wolf warrior" mode of diplomacy, as the government seeks to take more aggressive actions to defend its interests and expand its influence in the international environment. While this has in many cases produced successful outcomes, there is also a growing body of evidence that Beijing is running into resistance.

Luke Patey, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and Lead Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, joins Robert Amsterdam on this podcast to discuss his fascinating new book, "How China Loses: The Pushback against Chinese Global Ambitions," which focuses on these issues.

According to Patey, China has shown a determined strategy to use initiatives such as Belt and Road and Made in China 2025 to achieve dominance in high-tech industries and advanced manufacturing. Many fear that China's economic clout, tech innovations, and military power will allow it to remake the world in its own authoritarian image. But despite all these strengths, a future with China in charge is far from certain, Patey argues. There are increasing examples of this strategy failing - and not just because there is any sort of coherent resistance from Washington. China's predatory economic agenda, headstrong diplomacy, and military expansion often undermine its global ambitions to dominate the global economy and world affairs. In Patey's book, he interviews activists, business managers, diplomats, and thinkers from Africa to Latin America who have been found themselves turned off by Beijing's charm offensive, revealing the challenges threatening to ground China's rising power.