Departures with Robert Amsterdam

Marina Litvinenko has seen a lot in her life. In 2006, her husband, the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, was assassinated by radioactive poisoning by agents of the Russian government. Her unrelenting quest for justice and answers has led through the courts, the media, and the highest levels of diplomacy - and yet, after all this time, there were people in the UK who still did not heed her warnings about dealing with Vladimir Putin before last year's invasion of Ukraine. In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Marina discusses her campaign, views and insights on the conflict in Ukraine, and how the West should deal with punishing those around Putin (while avoiding isolation of independent Russian citizens).

The period during which 'Il Duce' Benito Mussolini ruled Italy as prime minister from 1922 to 1943 remains as confusing and contested today as it did during the disastrous postwar years, due mainly to a series of myths about the man, his government, and facism in general. In the new book from the decorated historian Paul Corner, "Mussolini in Myth and Memory: The First Totalitarian Dictator," the author ruthlessly interrogates these myths, and explores what it means when we have such a large section of the Italian population continue to live in a fictional memory of a past "when the trains ran on time." Speaking in his interview with Robert Amsterdam, Corner explains that his book is about illusion, about the creation of towering myths. "We don't remember things to get them right," he says, "we remember them to get them wrong." Addressing the mistaken claims that Mussolini was somehow "strong" and "decisive" in memory, Corner documents all the incredibly inefficiencies, incompetence, corruption, and violence perpetrated by his highly repressive regime during these decades. There was not a sliver of "good governance" in fascist Italy, but a chaotic and intolerant regime which sought power, first under revolutionary socialism before switching to far-right nationalism, and has benefitted improperly from a historical narrative that has wrongly rehabilitated by parties seeking to benefit politically in today's environment.  

It may just be a smattering of insignificant rocks and reefs along the Nine-dash line between the Philippines and China, but in recent years this area has become the focus of the world's most complex and dangerous maritime dispute. China's growing influence and willingness to project its will against smaller neighbors and US allies has drawn Washington into a set of intersecting disputes, while placing significant pressure on America's commitment to established international law regarding open seas. This week on Departures we are pleased to feature Gregory Poling, the Southeast Asia Program and Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. Poling is the author of the new book, "On Dangerous Ground: America's Century in the South China Sea," which offers a detailed and highly engaging history of Washington's involvement in this part of the world and how the current tensions evolved from past unsettled issues. Poling's book takes issue with the China-centric narrative which has become embedded in the global conversation about these territorial claims, and puts the focus on strategic decisionmaking happening not just in Beijing and Washington, but also among many other smaller neighboring Southeast Asian countries with interests at play.  

In the age of information and with growing calls around the world for democracy, Vladimir Putin, Lee Kuan Yew and Alberto Fujimori are redefining what it means to be a dictator in the 21st century. Through the manipulation of information, media, and using censorship, this new breed of despots are covertly monopolizing power under the guise of democracy.  Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman's new book, "Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century," explores these new methods of discipline, postmodern propoganda, and global pillage to control the masses, while counselling the way forward for democracies and the global community at large.  In his discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Guriev explains the difference between spin and fear dictators, and how free societies tendencies towards innovation can save democracy; as well as current political structures in Israel and Georgia, debating how they could be at risk of sliding into this new version of authoritarianism. His research highlights the importance of current democracies holding themselves accountable for missteps as a means to reduce whataboutism by these dictators for the purpose of mass manipulation. 

In international finance, the difference between what is legal and normal and what is criminal and corrupt is often unclear, a disparity made worse by an overlapping series of laws and regulations which in some cases can put U.S. competition at a disadvantage. These networks of illicit finance, shell corporations, and offshore structures used by global elites to create, move, and conceal vast amounts of wealth is explored in great detail by Prof. Kimberly Kay Hoang in her new book, "Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets." Hoang's investigation, which involved some 350,000 miles of travel and dozens of field interviews with executives and market players, sheds light on this secretive and poorly understood corner of the global economy. In her discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Hoang explains how shell corporations can be set up to move funds from statelets like Guernsey, to more well known offshore havens like the Cayman Islands, as well as Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Delaware, among many others. Her investigaiton brings fresh insights to the shortcomings of laws like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which has imposed very high compliance costs on US companies but has done little to halt the activity of other players.

As we approach the one-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a number of journalists and authors have published highly detailed chronicles from the battlefield, stories of resilience and heroism of the Ukrainian resistance, and geopolitical analyses across the spectrum. But quite few of these books view the war through Russian eyes, understanding the thinking that motivated the decision to declare war, and how everything thus far has so clearly defied their expectations. This week we're pleased to feature the veteran foreign correspondent Owen Matthews, whose new book, "Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine" investigates the historical roots of the conflict from Moscow's perspective, detailing the fog of extreme paranoia around Vladimir Putin and how perceptions of the Western threat and convictions of Ukrainian weakness led the country into disaster. "What is objectively bad for Russia is not necessarily bad for the siloviki - the men of power around Putin," says Matthews in his conversation with Robert Amsterdam. "Why is that? Because they got the Russia they wanted, they want a Russia that is cut off from the West, with an elite that does not have divided loyalties that does not earn its money in the West or spend its money in the West. (...) They really are convinced that this is a defensive war against Western aggression." Less than Putin being driven by imperial ambitions to rebuild a new Soviet Union, Matthews sees more evidence of his ethno-nationalist orientation, that he genuinely believes that he is "saving" the Russian speaking world from Western aggression - and from there, a cascading series of miscalculations begin to take shape. A fascinating book on the world's most pressing geopolitical crisis, Owen Matthews writes with clarity and a personal presence that brings deeper understanding to this most important conflict.      

The role of foreign correspondents, especially during times of war, can be extraordinarily important not only in shaping public perceptions and strategic decisionmaking at the highest level, but also in informing on revolutionary shifts in social norms, as these reporters find themselves bringing their personal lives into the public and the newsmaking process into their own relationships. In Deborah Cohen's kaleidoscopic ensemble biography, "Last Call at the Hotel Imperial," the reader is given unprecedented access to the personal lives of legendary American reporters John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, James Vincent “Jimmy” Sheean and Dorothy Thompson as they reported on the rise of fascism in Europe and the gradual impending horror of what was to come. In her conversation with Robert Amsterdam about the book, Cohen, who is a history professor at Northwestern University, discusses the incredible intimacy of how her subjects experienced the cultural changes that were taking place in the background in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Cohen describes it not only as a geopolitical history told through these colorful and glamorous journalists, but a book of personal history, of people discovering that they could not live the way that their parents did, and how the actualization of these new personal freedoms interacted with their careers.

After almost 23 years in power, Russian President Vladimir Putin currently appears more weakened and vulnerable than during any other period of his presidency, thanks in large part to his disastrous decision to invade Ukraine. On this week's Departures, we bring back the veteran journalist Luke Harding, who for years serving the Guardian's correspondent in Moscow before being expelled. Harding's latest book, "Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival," takes readers on a trip along the various battlefronts of this conflict, bringing rich detail and color to the main protagonists on both sides. As a reporter on the ground in Kyiv when the invasion started, Harding describes the sense of unreality surrounding the war, and the astounding resilience and leadership shown by the Ukrainian people and their leadership in resistance to Russian aggression. In this discussion with host Robert Amsterdam, Harding shares his views on Putin's health concerns and decisionmaking, how the conflict has reordered global affairs, especially in European security cooperation, and has contributed to a further isolation of an increasingly intolerant, totalitarian state in Russia.

When we talk about the gig economy, we usually are referring to rideshare drivers, errand runners, and all sorts of service industry freelancers. But we rarely think about the freelancers and non-state actors which take part in wars and armed conflict, doing the sometimes violent fighting and often disruptive hacking, as playing a very important role in how some of the world's most intractable competitions for influence develop into hybrid wars and eventually into conventional wars between nation states. Joining the podcast this week is the author and journalist Anna Arutunyan, whose new book, "Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow's Struggle for Ukraine," explores the myraid ways in which Vladimir Putin's approach to the invasion of Ukraine earlier this year was colored by his history of deploying a chaotic and decentralized network of "rogues, businessmen, enthusiasts, mercenaries and political technologists" into the separatist conflict. In her discussion with Departures host Robert Amsterdam, Arutunyan offers her vision of Moscow's rationale at the time which led to the decision to invade, how Putin's decisionmaking process left open several blindspots, and what happens when hybrid wars escalate out of control.  Arutunyan's book offers surprising insights to many Western readers, drawing the granular relationships between civilians, non-state actors, and the Kremlin, which is often lost in our wider understanding of how Putin’s administration works and how it has strategically approached its war on Ukraine.

Though we often view China's increasingly activist foreign policy in its trade wars, territorial disputes, and frequent collisions with Western states, less attention is paid to its gradual and quiet expansion of influence in the 'Stans of Central Asia. But it is here, among the populations of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan where one can see the true evolution of the Belt and Road Initiative, and watch the in progress departure of Russian influence over these former Soviet republics which has only accelerated since the war in Ukraine.  In this episode of Departures we welcome the Raffaello Pantucci, the co-author along with the late Alexandros Petersen of the remarkably unique book, "Sinostan: China's Inadvertent Empire." Pantucci and Petersen, the latter of whom was tragically killed in an attack in Afghanistan before the book's publication, underwent more than 10 years of field research and travel to draw this incredibly detailed portrait of the evolution of China's geo-economic footprint in the resource-rich Central Asian basin. With a highly visual narrative story-telling framework, Sinostan offers readers an unprecedented look inside how many Central Asian citizens and officials feel as this accidental empire has been built up around them.