The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition

This week on Rational Security, Alan Rozenshtein and Scott R. Anderson were joined by Lawfare executive editor Natalie Orpett and law professor extraordinaire Kate Klonick to hash through some of the week's big national security news, including: 

• “Time to Musk Up.” Prototypical eccentric billionaire Elon Musk has just finalized a deal to purchase Twitter, bring it private and implement a number of changes he claims are intended to expand freedom of speech. What will this mean for the future of Twitter and other social media platforms?
• “Lvivin’ so Soon?” The Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State just finished a visit to Kyiv, where they committed more support and to gradually restaff the U.S. diplomatic presence in-country. Why are U.S. diplomats behind Europe in returning to Kyiv? Should the Biden administration move more quickly?
• “Too Much MTG Gives Me Headaches.” Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene gave several hours of testimony at a hearing on Friday triggered by efforts by progressive activists to disqualify her from holding office for supporting the Jan. 6 insurrection, pursuant to section 3 of the 14th Amendment. What did we learn about Greene’s activities that day? And what should we make of the broader effort to disqualify legislators? 

For object lessons, Alan endorsed the sci-fi action adventure comedy drama "Everything Everywhere All at Once" and its stirring depiction of laundromats and the IRS. Kate shouted out her decade old "Loose Tweets Sink Fleets" poster and celebrated the fact that it becomes more relevant by the day. Scott announced that his effort to make flavored rotten pineapple water succeeded with flying colors, and encouraged listeners to use pineapple scraps to make their own tepache. And Natalie finally took a stand in support of comprehension and encouraged others to do the same with tee shirts that practically shout one's preference for the Oxford Comma from the rooftops.

Be sure to visit our show page at www.lawfareblog.com and to follow the show on Twitter at @RatlSecurity. 

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From August 22, 2012: This is the second in a series of interviews Ritika Singh is doing with scholars around town who have non-legal expertise that bears on the national security law issues Lawfare readers care about. As she did in her first piece with Brookings Senior Fellow Bruce Riedel, she is posting the full interview as an episode of the Lawfare Podcast and writing up a summary of their conversation as well.

The subject this time is Daniel Byman, Senior Fellow and Director of Research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, and a professor at Georgetown University's Security Studies Program. Byman is one of the country’s foremost experts on counterterrorism and the Middle East. He served as a staff member on the 9/11 Commission, and has worked for the U.S. government and at the RAND Corporation. He recently published a paper entitled Breaking the Bonds between Al Qaeda and its Affiliate Organizations that Ritika describes in more detail here. They sat down for a discussion of the major themes that make up his paper—themes that dovetail with those Ritika discussed with Riedel in her first interview. 

In May 2022, Lawfare and Goat Rodeo will debut their latest podcast, Allies, a series about America’s eyes and ears over 20 years of war in Afghanistan. Thousands of Afghans who worked with the American soldiers as translators, interpreters and partners made it onto U.S. military planes. But despite the decades-long efforts of veterans, lawmakers and senior leaders in the military, even more were left behind. This show will take you from the frontlines of the war to the halls of Congress to find out: How did this happen? Learn more and subscribe to Allies at https://pod.link/1619035873.

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Last week, a federal district judge in Florida named Kathryn Mizelle struck down the Biden administration's policy requiring that individuals wear masks on airplanes and other forms of interstate travel. In doing so, she adopted an extremely narrow reading of relevant public health statutes to conclude that they did not authorize any such masking policies, a move that has since triggered more questions about what public health tools the federal government will have left if Mizelle’s decision is left to stand. 

To better understand this decision and its ramifications, Scott R. Anderson sat down with two legal experts: Lindsay Wiley, a professor specializing in health, law and policy at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law, and Alan Rozenshtein, a Lawfare senior editor and professor of, among other things, legislative and regulatory law at the University of Minnesota Law School. They talked about Mizelle’s approach to statutory interpretation, the role of the major questions doctrine, whether her views are likely to survive appeal and how the entire endeavor is likely to impact ongoing efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

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Finlandization is a troubled concept. It is generally used to describe the attempt by the Soviet Union during the Cold War to hold Finland in a position of neutrality and friendliness toward the Soviet Union, even while politically, Finland was more aligned with the West. In recent years—before the Russian invasion of Ukraine—it was sometimes brought up as a model for Ukraine to straddle the boundary between east and west. But for Finns, Finlandization meant something quite dark—the long-term subjugation of Finland's politics to the will of an authoritarian neighbor.

David Priess sat down with Antti Ruokonen, who wrote an article recently for Lawfare titled, “Why Finlandization is a Terrible Model for Ukraine.” They spoke about Finland's experience in the second World War, the imposed restrictions on its sovereignty because of this Finlandization during the Cold War, and the dangers of seeing Finlandization as a model for peaceful coexistence with Russia.

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Vladislav Davidzon is a journalist and author. He is a New Yorker, a Parisian and an Odessa resident. He's the author of “From Odessa with Love: Political and Literary Essays in Post-Soviet Ukraine,” and he joined Benjamin Wittes from Odessa where he is covering the war.

It's a wide-ranging conversation about the course of the war, the state of life in Odessa today and the current state of Ukrainian politics. They talked about how the war is really going, about myths and facts about denazification of Ukraine and about what Ukraine will look like as a political society when the war is over. 

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From July 12, 2014: As the election crisis in Afghanistan comes to a head, all eyes—or some of them, anyway—are once again on the future of Afghan democracy. But the United States's history in the region extends back much further than its nation-building efforts there since September 2001. On Tuesday, at a Brookings Institution launch event for his newest book entitled, “What We Won: America’s Secret War in Afghanistan, 1979-1989,” Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow and Director of the Intelligence Project at Brookings, discussed lessons the United States can learn from its successful efforts in the 1970s and 1980s in Afghanistan. In his talk, Riedel discusses why the American intelligence operation in Afghanistan in the 1980s was so successful, and what, if any lessons, the United States can apply to its ongoing operations in the country. Riedel also explored the complex personalities and individuals who shaped the war, and explained how their influence still affects the region today. Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott provided introductory remarks and moderated the conversation.

In May 2022, Lawfare and Goat Rodeo will debut their latest podcast, Allies, a series about America’s eyes and ears over 20 years of war in Afghanistan. Thousands of Afghans who worked with the American soldiers as translators, interpreters and partners made it onto U.S. military planes. But despite the decades-long efforts of veterans, lawmakers and senior leaders in the military, even more were left behind. This show will take you from the frontlines of the war to the halls of Congress to find out: How did this happen? Learn more and subscribe to Allies at https://pod.link/1619035873.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.