Eric and Eliot discuss Secretary Hegseth's restoration of the '"Reunion" memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, the President's nationalizing of the DC National Guard to engage in law enforcement in the nation's capital, and the diplomatic pratfalls of Steve Witkoff whose misinterpretation of President Putin has resulted in the misbegotten forthcoming summit in Alaska between Trump and Putin. To distract themselves from the administration's ongoing idiocy Eric and Eliot discuss their summer reading including Toby Wilkinson's A World Beneath the Sands, H. Ridder Haggard's She, and Daniel Silva's An Inside Job among others.

Eliot and Eric welcome Fred Starr, former President of Oberlin University and current Chairman of the Central Asia and Caucasus Institute (CACI). They discuss the current situation in Russia and highlight the logistic difficulties and enormous human and material losses that Russian forces are facing. They also discuss Central Asian countries like Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan which are rich in mineral and hydrocarbon resources but have been governed by strongmen in the post-communist era. Finally, they conclude the conversation with an overview of the Caucuses highlighting the desire of many former Soviet states to escape Moscow's imperial shadow.

Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union:

https://a.co/d/a8EbOiO

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

Eric and Eliot address the latest buffoonery emanating from the Pentagon before turning to a discussion about Trump's evolving position on Russia. They also address the horrendous situation in Gaza and try to apportion blame as fairly as possible given the difficulty of parsing statements by both Hamas and the Israeli government. The conversation includes updates on the situations in Syria, Iran, and domestically on Columbia University's recent settlement with the Trump Administration.

Secretary of Defense Hegseth's Think Tank Ban:

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/28/pentagon-think-tank-ban-confusion-reaction-00480095

Hegseth's Clash with Pentagon Leadership:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/us/politics/hegseth-pentagon-leadership.html

Matti Friedman: Is Gaza Starving? Searching for the Truth in an Information War:

https://www.thefp.com/p/matti-friedman-is-gaza-starving-searching-for-truth-in-information-war

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

Eric and Eliot welcome Karen Elliott House, former long-time correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, President of Dow Jones International, Publisher of the Wall Street Journal and author of The Man Who Would Be King: Mohammed Bin Salman and the Transformation of Saudi Arabia (New York: HarperCollins, 2025). They discuss the rise of MBS, the scope of the changes he has wrought in the Kingdom in less than a decade in power, the ongoing forces of resistance to change, his effort to replace Islam with nationalism as a force binding Saudis together, and MBS's views of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a "middle power' in a world of great power competition.

The Man Who Would Be King: Mohammed bin Salman and the Transformation of Saudi Arabia:

https://a.co/d/etBZ1Yp

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

Eric and Eliot welcome Rebecca Friedman Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper to Shield of the Republic to discuss their recent article in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, "Absent at the Creation?: American Strategy and the Delusion of a Post-Trump Restoration." They discuss the speed with which Trump has imposed policy changes, the likelihood that old international order will be irreparably broken by the end of this term, the limits of American resilience, and the emergence of a multipolar world order. They also discuss challenges to American pre-eminence of emerging technologies and "compounding geopolitical risks" that Trump's cuts to research, assault on universities, and limits on tech transfer to China will do to U.S. innovation and international competitiveness. Note: After this episode was recorded the Trump administration announced approval of AI semiconductor chip sales to China.

Rebecca Lissner & Mira Rapp-Hooper's latest in Foreign Affairs:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/absent-creation-rebecca-lissner

An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for Twenty-First-Century Order:

https://a.co/d/bHYjPGk

Shields of the Republic: The Triumph and Peril of America’s Alliances:

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

Wars of Revelation: The Transformative Effects of Military Intervention on Grand Strategy

https://a.co/d/a65aUif

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

Eric and Eliot cover the latest Pentagon dysfunction, with military aid to Ukraine stalled and mixed signals on Trump’s defense policy. They also look at the Iran strikes, Trump’s shifting posture on Putin, and the growing strain inside the MAGA foreign policy orbit.

Eric and Eliot host a special Shield of the Republic episode to discuss the Iranian response to Trump's strike on Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. They assess the largely symbolic Iranian attack on al Udeid Air Base in Qatar as an attempt to take an off ramp from further escalation as they did in the aftermath of the Soleimani strike in 2020. They also touch on why Trump did it, the difficulties of bomb damage assessment, what happened to the HEU and are there other Iranian facilities, the Israeli intelligence brief, the cracks in MAGA, Trump's sudden endorsement of regime change and the hypocrisy of those calling for a Congressional vote to legitimize the actions given their prior support for Obama's operation in Libya and Clinton's campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo all of which took place without a vote.

Eliot's Latest in The Atlantic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/trump-iran/683287/

Eric (with Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh) in Foreign Affairs:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/right-path-regime-change-iran

Where Does Iran Go Now? (The New York Times):

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/23/opinion/iran-iranians-regime.html

Inside the spy dossier that led Israel to war (The Economist):

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2025/06/18/inside-the-spy-dossier-that-led-israel-to-war

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

In a special episode of Shield of the Republic, Eric and Eliot discuss the Israeli military operation against Iran. They discuss the intelligence on Iran that purportedly prompted the decision to take military action against the Iranian program, the questions of whether the operation is really about regime change, if the US intervenes and bombs the facility at Fordow will it lead to a quagmire or endless war, the split inside MAGA over the President's apparent openness to using military force and joining the Israeli campaign against the Iranian nuclear program, the lack of staffing process and Trump's attempt to play an appropriate role as civilian leader in the "unequal dialogue" between political leaders and their military chiefs.

Eliot's latest in The Atlantic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/three-dramatic-consequences-israels-attack-iran/683235/

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

Eric and Eliot welcome LTG (ret.) Douglas Lute, former Director of Operations for the Joint Staff, Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and former U.S. Ambassador to NATO to discuss the upcoming June 24-25 NATO Summit in the Hague. They discuss NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte's formulas for reaching the Trump Administration target for NATO Members to spend 5% of GDP on Defense (Rutte has proposed a 3 1/2 % defense spending target with 1 1/2% spending on infrastructure counting toward the 5% objective). Lute highlights the unpredictability that Trump brings to NATO Summits recounting his own experience in 2017 with the unveiling of the Article 5 memorial commemorating the invocation of Article 5 in response to 9/11 which Trump used as an opportunity to excoriate Angela Merkel and other European leaders. They discuss European attitudes towards Trump 2.0 and whether the shock effect will lead to more effective European efforts on defense. They discuss intra-European dynamics at NATO, the role Ukraine will play at the Summit, Trump's aversion to using leverage against Putin, extended nuclear deterrence in Europe, the communique drafting process at NATO (spoiler alert: there will be no communique at this Summit), the NSC decision-making process and Trump's parade and the danger of politicizing the military.

Eliot's latest in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/cohen-military-parade/683143/

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

Eliot and Eric offer up candidates for jackassery of the week before turning to a discussion of The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, (New York: Crown, 2025) the second volume of journalist/historian Rick Atkinson's monumental military history of the American revolution. They discuss Atkinson's background as a military journalist for the Washington Post who has written books about the Gulf War, the Iraq War and covered other late 20th and 21st Century conflicts before turning his attention to writing a trilogy on the US Army in Europe during the Second World War and now the American Revolution.  They discuss the depth of his research in both archives in the U.S. and UK as well as his process for researching and writing these massive volumes (each of which has taken about 5-6 years to produce) and the decline of grand narrative history in the academy (despite the public demand for it). They consider how his own experience as a journalist affected his sense of the contingency of warfare and the fact that there are always tensions between the architects of war in capitals and the officers and troops on the ground. He explains how King George III and his ministers never understood the American drive for independence and were gripped by strategic misconceptions about how to fight the war, including the notion that there was a silent majority of North Americans who supported the monarchy despite the fact that the loyalists had mostly fled the colonies to Canada, the Caribbean or London. They discuss the star crossed career of Benedict Arnold, Washington's generalship at the Battle of Brandywine in Pennsylvania, and, finally, how Americans should think about the meaning of the American revolution today as we celebrate the sesquicentennial of the war for independence over the next 8 years.

The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780: https://a.co/d/b6rFlQV

The Liberation Trilogy Boxed Set: An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light: https://a.co/d/dWBRojr

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