Great Power Podcast

In this episode of GREAT POWER PODCAST, host Michael Sobolik speaks once again with Ilan Berman, Senior Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council, about disinformation, public diplomacy, and media narratives — specifically in the context of U.S.-China relations. 

Guest Biography 

Ilan Berman is Senior Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC. An expert on regional security in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Russian Federation, he has consulted for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency as well as the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, and has also provided assistance on foreign policy and  national security issues to a range of governmental agencies and congressional offices. He has been called one of America's "leading experts on the Middle East and Iran" by CNN. Mr. Berman is a member of the Associated Faculty at Missouri State University's Department of Defense and Strategic Studies. A frequent writer and commentator, he has written for the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Washington Post and USA Today, among many other publications. He has also edited and published multiple books. 

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In this episode of GREAT POWER PODCAST, host Michael Sobolik interviews Craig Singleton about the People's Liberation Army (PLA), risk of strategic overstretch, and ways the United States can exploit this possibility.

Guest Biography

Craig Singleton is a senior fellow at FDD, where he analyzes great power competition with China. He previously spent more than a decade serving in a series of sensitive national security roles with the U.S. government, where he primarily focused on East Asia. In that capacity, Craig regularly briefed federal law enforcement, U.S. military personnel, foreign governments, congressional oversight committees, and the White House on a wide range of issues, including China’s overseas military expansion, Chinese malign influence, and North Korea. Craig is a regular contributor to outlets such as Foreign Policy, The Hill, Defense News, Newsweek, The National Interest, The Diplomat, Real Clear Defense, The Wall Street Journal, Axios, Yahoo, CNBC, NBC News, and Fox News. Craig received his bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Florida and his master’s degree in international policy from the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.

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In this episode of GREAT POWER PODCAST, host Michael Sobolik interviews Ian Easton about the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, its impact on Beijing’s foreign policy, and what it means for the United States.

Guest Biography

Ian Easton is a senior director at the Project 2049 Institute and author of The Chinese Invasion Threat: Taiwan's Defense and American Strategy in Asia. He previously served as a visiting fellow at the Japan Institute for International Affairs (JIIA) in Tokyo and a China analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses in Virginia. He has testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and given talks at the U.S. Naval War College, Japan’s National Defense Academy, and Taiwan’s National Defense University. Ian holds an M.A. in China Studies from National Chengchi University in Taiwan and a B.A. in International Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He studied Chinese at Fudan University in Shanghai and National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei.

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In this episode of GREAT POWER PODCAST, host Michael Sobolik interviews Nury Turkel about the Chinese Communist Party's genocide in Xinjiang, the nature of the atrocities, and what it means for the United States.

Guest Biography

Nury Turkel is the first U.S.-educated Uyghur-American lawyer, foreign policy expert, and human rights advocate. He is the recent author of No Escape: The True Story of China's Genocide of the Uyghurs. He was born in a re-education camp at the height of China’s tumultuous Cultural Revolution and spent the first several months of his life in detention with his mother. He came to the United States in 1995 as a student and was later granted asylum by the U.S. government. Since June 2021, Turkel has served as the Vice Chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. In September 2020, Turkel was named one of the TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World; and in May 2021, he was named on Fortune's List of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders. He is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In June 2021, the Notre Dame Law School Religious Liberty Initiative honored Turkel with the first Notre Dame Prize for Religious Liberty. Turkel received an M.A. in International Relations and a J.D. from the American University in Washington, DC. As an attorney, he specializes in regulatory compliance, federal investigation and enforcement, anti-bribery, legislative advocacy, and immigration. In addition to his professional career, Turkel has devoted his time and energy to promoting Uyghur human rights and supporting American and universal democratic norms. He serves as the Chairman of the Board for the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), which he co-founded in 2003.

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In this episode of GREAT POWER PODCAST, host Michael Sobolik interviews Derek Grossman about the recent security agreement between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Solomon Islands, what it means for the United States and our Indo-Pacific allies, and what America should do moving forward.

Guest Biography

Derek Grossman is a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation focused on a range of national security policy and Indo-Pacific security issues. He closely tracks intensifying U.S.-China competition throughout the region, to include in Northeast, Southeast, South, and Central Asia as well as Oceania. He has led or participated in numerous RAND studies assessing regional responses to competition, with a particular emphasis on Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Pacific Island states, Philippines, Vietnam, and Taiwan.    

Grossman is widely quoted regionally and globally. He has interviewed with Australian Broadcasting Corp, BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, LA Times, New York Times, NPR, Sydney Morning Herald, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and others. Grossman has published dozens of commentaries and journal articles, including for Asia Policy, Foreign Policy, International Security, Nikkei Asia, Strategic Studies Quarterly, Studies in Intelligence, The Diplomat, The Hill, War on the Rocks, and World Politics Review.

Before RAND, Grossman served over a decade in the Intelligence Community, where he served as the daily intelligence briefer to the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and to the assistant secretary of defense for Asian & Pacific Security Affairs. He also served at the National Security Agency and worked at the CIA on the President's Daily Brief staff. 

Grossman is an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California and an Indo-Pacific Fellow at the Perth USAsia Centre. He holds an M.A. from Georgetown University in U.S. national security policy and a B.A. from the University of Michigan in political science and Asian studies.

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In this episode of GREAT POWER PODCAST, host Michael Sobolik speaks with Dr. Joshua Eisenman about China-Africa relations, Beijing's strategic interests in the continent, and what it means for the United States.

Author Biography

Joshua Eisenman is an Associate Professor of Politics at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Eisenman has been a visiting faculty member at Fudan University (summer 2017), Peking University (summer 2016), and NYU–Shanghai (2011–12). He was a policy analyst on the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (2003–05) and has been senior fellow for China studies at the American Foreign Policy Council since 2006. Before coming to Notre Dame in 2019, he was assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

Eisenman holds a PhD in political science from UCLA, an MA in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) where he studied at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, and a BA in East Asian Studies from The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.

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In this episode of GREAT POWER PODCAST, host Michael Sobolik speaks with Dr. Jonathan Ward about the strategic alignment between Russia and China, what it means for our allies and partners across Eurasia, and how Washington should respond.

Resources from the Episode

Guest Biography

Jonathan Ward has been studying Russia, China, and India for nearly twenty years since his undergraduate days in Russian and Chinese language at Columbia University. Dr. Ward is the author of China’s Vision of Victory, a guide to the global grand strategy of the Chinese government which has been widely read in US government and national security circles, as well as by audiences in business and finance. He earned his PhD at the University of Oxford where he specialized in China-India relations, after initially being admitted to Oxford for a doctorate in Russia-China relations during the Cold War. He has traveled widely in Russia, China, India, Latin America and the Middle East, and speaks Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic, among other languages. As a subject matter expert, Dr. Ward has been an advisor to the US Department of Defense on Chinese long-term strategy and has briefed numerous US government audiences including at US Strategic Command, US Indo-Pacific Command, the US Department of Commerce, the US Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Strategy Division of the US Naval Staff. Through his consulting company, Atlas Organization, Dr. Ward helps Fortune 500 companies and financial institutions understand US-China global competition, improve their risk assessments on China, and build new global strategies that can withstand historic geopolitical change. He is a frequent commentator on national and international television and radio, with appearances on Bloomberg, CNBC, Fox Business, Fox, MSNBC and CNN International, among other stations. His next book, on the future of US strategy towards China is forthcoming in 2023.

In this episode of GREAT POWER PODCAST, host Michael Sobolik speaks with Jon Pelson, author of Wireless Wars: China's Dangerous Domination of 5G and How We're Fighting Back. The conversation covers Huawei's rise to global dominance of telecommunications, the national security risks that Huawei and other Chinese tech companies pose to democracies like the United States, and how America can regain its footing in its technological competition with the Chinese Communist Party.

Author Biography

Jonathan Pelson joined Lucent Technologies during the telecom boom of the ‘90s, helping create and market some of the company’s breakthrough technology solutions. He later served as the Chief of Convergence Strategy for British Telecom, developing a global wireless plan for the company. During his time with these and other telecom companies, he traveled to China and saw that country’s fledgling telecommunications companies grow and eventually seize the world lead. With deep personal experience in the sector and rare access to the people who ran the world’s largest telecom companies, he decided to investigate how the lead was lost to the Chinese and what we could do to take it back. Jon has a degree in economics from Dartmouth College and an MBA from the Darden School at the University of Virginia.

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In this episode of GREAT POWER PODCAST, host Michael Sobolik speaks with Victoria Coates, Distinguished Fellow in Strategic Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC), about Russia's war threats against Ukraine, the related energy politics of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and what the road ahead could look like.

Guest Biography

Victoria Coates joined the American Foreign Policy Council as a Distinguished Fellow in Strategic Studies in January 2022. Coates works on regional issues such as energy policy, countering predatory Chinese activity, expanding the historic Abraham Accords between Israel and Muslim-majority nations, and establishing a U.S.-led Middle East strategic alliance. Coates routinely appears on TV and radio outlets such as Fox News and CNN. Her writing has appeared in Bloomberg, FoxNews.com, The Jerusalem Post, The New York Post, Newsweek, The National Interest, National Review, The New Criterion, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Examiner, and The Washington Times.

Coates previously served as the Deputy National Security Advisor for the Middle East and North Africa on the National Security Council staff and the Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary of Energy in the Donald J. Trump administration.  She also served as the National Security Advisor in the office of Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and as Director of Research for (former) Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s 2011 memoir, Known and Unknown. 

Coates holds a B.A. from Trinity College, a M.A. from Williams College, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, all in art history.  Coates is the author and presenter of dozens of publications and conference papers worldwide on the intersections of art and history, including David’s Sling: A History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art (Encounter Books, 2016).

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In this episode of GREAT POWER PODCAST, host Michael Sobolik speaks with Ambassador Samuel Brownback, the former Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, about the role of religious freedom in foreign policy, the tension between human rights and geopolitics, and global hotspots of religious persecution.

Guest Biography

Samuel Brownback served as the United States Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom from 2018 to 2021. Previously, Brownback served as the U.S. representative for Kansas's 2nd congressional district (1995–96), as a United States senator from Kansas (1996–2011), and the 46th governor of Kansas (2011–18).

Resources from the Conversation