Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

Record inflation, another wake-up call out of Beijing, a new prime minister in the UK, overhang of supply chain shocks and massive fiscal and monetary stimulus from the pandemic, all against the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine war, which shows no signs of abating. What are the economic implications of all this? What should Central Banks be doing? Dr. Mohamed El-Erian returns to the podcast. He is President of Queens' College at Cambridge University. Mohamed serves as part-time Chief Economic Advisor at Allianz and Chair of Gramercy Fund Management. He’s a Professor at The Wharton School, he is a Financial Times contributing editor, Bloomberg Opinion columnist, and the author of two New York Times best sellers. He serves on several non-profit boards, including the NBER, and those of Barclays and Under Armour. From 2007-2014, Mohamed served as CEO/co-CIO of PIMCO. He worked at PIMCO for a total of fourteen years, and was chair of President Obama's Global Development Council. Mohamed also served two years as president and CEO of Harvard Management Company, the entity that manages Harvard’s endowment. He has been chair of the Microsoft Investment Advisory Board since 2007.

With less than 3 weeks to the mid-term elections, Karl Rove joins the conversation. Karl served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush and White House Deputy Chief of Staff. He was the architect of both of President Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns. He is the author "The Triumph of William McKinley" and also "Courage and Consequence". He writes a weekly column for The Wall Street Journal.

With increasing talk about nuclear threats, we have three questions in this episode: What do we know from Putin’s past behavior that could inform how high up the ladder of escalation he is prepared to go? What are the next rungs up the ladder of escalation before the nuclear threat is real? As Putin moves up this escalatory ladder, what are the calculations of Zelensky, Europe’s leaders, and President Biden? Military analyst and Russia historian Fred Kagan returns to the podcast. Fred is the director of the American Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute and a former professor of military history at West Point, where he taught for ten years. Fred regularly advises senior US military commanders. He earned his PhD in Russian and Soviet military history at Yale University. Fred has a contrarian take on possible off-ramps for Putin (spoiler-alert: he doesn’t think there are any). And Fred also has a contrarian take on President Biden’s recent comments about a “nuclear armageddon”. To follow Fred Kagan’s work, the easiest way to do that is to go to AEI.org and understandingwar.org.

We have all seen the images of women in cities across Iran burning their headscarves and cutting their hair in public to chants of "Death to the dictator.". The protests began after the September 13th death of 22-year-old Masha Amini. According to reports, Iranian morality police had accused Amini of violating laws mandating women cover their hair. These events appear to have sparked a major public backlash against the Iranian regime. But how serious is the threat to the Iranian regime? Reuel Marc Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Washington-based think tank, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He was previously a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Earlier, he served as a Middle Eastern specialist at the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. In that role, he was focused on Iran targets. Among his many books, Reuel is the author of Know Thine Enemy: A Spy’s Journey into Revolutionary Iran and The Islamic Paradox: Shiite Clerics, Sunni Fundamentalists, and the Coming of Arab Democracy. He has been a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, as well as a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Dispatch.

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, begins in a few days. Kol Nidrei, is one of the most misunderstood parts of the Jewish high holidays -- and of the entirety of Jewish liturgy -- according to Rabbi Meir Soloveichik. He laid this out in a recent thought-provoking piece in The Wall Street Journal, which you can access here: https://tinyurl.com/44e4z7z8 Rabbi Soloveichik is the senior rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States. He is also director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. He has a must-listen daily podcast called Bible 365, which you can access through the Tikvah Fund. He is prolific – he writes a monthly column in Commentary magazine, and his writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Mosaic, the Jewish Review of Books, and many other outlets. You can keep up with all of his work at meirsoloveichik.com

Vladamir Putin has announced what he called a “partial mobilization” of up to 300,000 reservists. According to reports, these reservists are basically former conscripts that will need training. Meanwhile, commercial flights out of Russia are apparently selling out, fast. The Russian Duma, on the other hand, is passing a law to clamp down on anyone evading their military service. And then there was Putin’s seeming dangling of the nuclear threat again. All against the backdrop of the Kremlin organizing referenda on whether four occupied regions in Ukraine should fall under Russian sovereignty. And how do we assess US military support for Ukraine? Richard Fontaine is the CEO of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), bi-partisan foriegn policy think tank in Washington, DC. Prior to CNAS, he was foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain and worked at the State Department, the National Security Council, and on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He serves on the Biden administration’s Defense Policy Board – which advises the Pentagon. Richard is also just back from a trip to the Middle East – so we also talk at the end about the two-year anniversary of the Abraham Accords (a topic we’ll be returning to from time to time on this podcast) and also the status of the Iran deal negotiations.

Between now and November, we will be taking a close look at the midterm election season, which -- for most voters -- is just kicking off now. If history is a guide, the first mid-term election cycle of a new president should result in the opposing party (the party not in the White House) scoring a wave of victories in Congress. How big will the wave be? New polls suggest that there may not be much of a wave for Republicans. But are these new polls missing something? To offer a masterclass in how to de-code the polls -- and a number of other dynamics in these midterms -- Mike Murphy returns to the podcast. Mike’s worked on 26 gubernatorial and US Senate races across the country, including 12 wins in Blue States – something that’s getting harder and harder to do for Republicans. He was a top strategist for John McCain, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s a political analyst for NBC and MSNBC. He’s co-host of the Hacks on Tap podcast and newsletter. And Mike’s also co director of the University of Southern California’s Center for the Political Future. Pieces discussed in this episode: Mark Mellman: : https://tinyurl.com/3v74z3hp Nate Cohn: https://tinyurl.com/dzjrbc2m Hacks on Tap podcast: https://tinyurl.com/55j5pe5k Hacks on Tap newsletter: https://tinyurl.com/yckkzrpx

Are we getting closer to or farther away from an Iran deal? Walter Russell Mead of The Wall Street Journal has been following developments closely. I wanted to check in with him. But I also wanted to talk to Walter about his big new and groundbreaking book, called “The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People.” Walter has been immersed in writing this book for over a decade – it covers the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship, but it’s much more than that. It’s also a book about the history of US foreign policy. What has been America’s calculation behind U.S. support for Israel? Is it based on shared values – a fellow democracy in a dangerous region, defending a country born out of the ashes of the Holocaust? Or has U.S. policy been based on realpolitik – because Israel advances U.S. geopolitical interests? Or is it a blend of all of the above? What role does U.S. domestic politics play in all of this, if at all? Walter’s book frames our discussion not only about the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship, but the future of the relationship, and the future of U.S. foreign policy. Walter is at the Hudson Institute, he is the Global View Columnist at The Wall Street Journal and a professor at Bard College. He was previously the Henry Kissinger fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People: shorturl.at/bdhpz

While the unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 3.7% in August from a low of 3.5% in July, job growth still remained well above the pre-covid trend. There are over 11 million job openings – that’s more than twice the number of unemployed people. But according to a growing body of economics and social science research, the headline jobs numbers that we all track conceals a much bigger problem – the hidden crisis of able-bodied workers in their prime working age (25-54 years old), actually choosing to completely withdraw from the labor force. This has been a growing trend since the 1960s, but the pandemic accelerated it. One of these experts is Nicholas Eberstadt, who wrote a book in 2016 called “Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis”. He’s re-releasing the book this week, updated as the Post-Pandemic Edition. Eberstadt is at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he researches and writes extensively on demographics and economic development generally. He has written numerous books. He earned his PhD and masters degree in political economy from Harvard, and a Master of Science from the London School of Economics.

Matti Friedman is one of the most thoughtful writers when it comes to all matters related to Israel, on the broader Middle East, and also on trends in the world of journalism. He is a monthly writer for Tablet Magazine and a regular contributor to The Atlantic. His newest book is called “Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.” Before that he published "Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel," and before that "Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War," which was chosen as a New York Times’ Notable Book and as one of Amazon’s 10 best books of the year, and was selected as one of the year’s best by Foreign Affairs Magazine. Matti’s army service included tours in Lebanon. His work as a reporter has taken him from Israel to Lebanon, Morocco, Moscow, the Caucasus, and Washington, DC. He is a former Associated Press correspondent and essayist for the New York Times opinion section. We cover a lot of topics in this podcast, including how to make sense of the recent Israel-Gaza flare-up, how to view it in the frame of the broader Middle East, the state of journalism and how it covers geopolitical events and wars, and we also dive into his newest book, “Who By Fire." Matti Friedman's published works that we discuss in this episode: "There Is No 'Israeli-Palestinian Conflict'" -- The New York Times -- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/opinion/israeli-palestinian-conflict-matti-friedman.htm" "An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth" -- Tablet Magazine -- https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-insider-guide "What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel" -- The Atlantic -- https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/how-the-media-makes-the-israel-story/383262/ "The New Kibbutz" -- Tablet Magazine -- https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/kibbutz-matti-friedman "Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai" -- https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/who-by-fire-matti-friedman/1140395710?ean=9781954118072