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.