Shield of the Republic

Eric and Eliot host Sergey Radchenko, the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies based in Bologna, Italy. They discuss Sergey’s personal story of growing up in Sakhalin in the Soviet Union, living in China, becoming an historian and gaining access to documentary sources in both countries that were heretofore unavailable and which shed new light on the history of the Cold War. The discussion covers ideology vs. realpolitik in explaining Soviet foreign policy, the USSR as both a status quo and revolutionary power, the contingency of historical events, the psychology of Russian and Chinese leaders, the Sino-Soviet rivalry and competition for leadership of the communist world, who was responsible for the outbreak of the Cold War, and how Russia’s search for legitimacy, equality with the US and greatness, deeply rooted in Russian imperial and Soviet history has re-emerged in new forms under Vladimir Putin. Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Eric is rejoined by Eliot who has been reconnoitering his old stomping grounds in Boston. They discuss a series of upcoming elections, including in the UK on July 4 where the Tory Party (the oldest political party in the world) looks to be obliterated by a Labour landslide, France where President Macron's "party" looks likely to be squeezed out by Marine Le Pen's renovated version of the old anti-immigrant National Front and a New Popular Front of Leftist parties, and in Iran where reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian has emerged a real threat to conservative forces divided among Saaed Jalili, the former hard-line nuclear negotiator, Parliamentary Speaker Mohammed Qalibaf, and a gaggle of other conservatives amidst broad public apathy and disinterest in the election. They discuss the factors underpinning what seems like a global anti-incumbent wave. They also discuss the prospects for a war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and the prospects for a second Trump term as President.  Eliot believes that while a terrible prospect a second Trump Presidency might not be totally catastrophic both domestically and internationally while Eric argues the case for pessimism. Scheduling Note: Shield of the Republic will be taking a two-week break for the Independence Day holiday. Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Eric welcomes Professor Christopher Lynch, Chair of the Political Science Department at Missouri State University, the editor and translator of the most recent edition of Machiavelli's The Art of War and author of Machiavelli on War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023). They discuss Machiavelli as statesman, military leader and diplomat and Machiavelli as Political Philosopher, The Art of War as a treatise on combined arms warfighting, Machiavelli as the father of modern grand strategy, his views on war as revealed not only in the Art of War but his posthumously published works The Prince and The Discourses on Livy, whether Machiavelli was a "teacher of evil," his role as one of the progenitors of "realism" in international affairs, whether his teachings prefigure our modern notions of strategic competition between authoritarian states and liberal democracies and "the Prince's Dilemma" -- or what is the proper relationship between political authorities and military leaders, and both the time-bound and timeless nature of Machiavell's arguments. https://a.co/d/0dxfml05 Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Eric welcomes Eliot back from scenic Lake Champlain where Eliot communed with the spirit of Benedict Arnold. They host Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security and Ambassador (ret.) Robert Blackwill, the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. They discuss Fontaine and Blackwell's new book Lost Decade: The U.S. Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024). They review the origins and history of "The Pivot" to Asia during the Obama Administration, the reasons that this rebalancing of U.S. power and policy to the East was not implemented, the various efforts to do so subsequently and the reasons that they too did not succeed, the trade-offs among U.S. responsibilities for security in Europe and the Middle East and re-orienting to the Indo-Pacific, the need for a substantial increase in defense spending, the lack of a real trade policy for East Asia, the balance between diplomacy and deterrence and whether or not productive diplomacy with an autocratic regime and leader like Xi Jinping is even possible. https://a.co/d/3VvFaeh Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Eric hosts New York Times Chief Washington Correspondent David Sanger, author of The Inheritance, Confront and Conceal, The Perfect Weapon and most recently New Cold Wars:  China's Rise, Russia's Invasion and America's Struggle to Defend the West. They discuss the underlying assumptions that led American policymakers to underestimate the rise and threat of great power competition, whether hawks or doves have been more correct in analyzing the course of events over the past 15 years, the tensions, both past and present, in the Biden-Zelensky relationship, the Biden Administration's efforts at "escalation management" during the war in Ukraine, Russian nuclear threats and how seriously to take them, the question of whether the US and China have been engaged in an action-reaction spiral of distrust or whether Chinese actions have unfolded against a backdrop of American complacency, the unprecedented challenge of deterring two nuclear peers and the Biden Administration's Iran policy which seems to be on autopilot. New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West: https://a.co/d/9nTIoD3 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 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.

Eliot returns from the Lennert Meri Conference in Tallinn, Estonia and he and Eric are joined by Bret Stephens, columnist for the New York Times, founding Editor-in-Chief of SAPIR: A Journal of Jewish Conversation, former Editor in Chief of the Jerusalem Post, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary at the Wall Street Journal and author of America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder, (New York:  Sentinel, 2014). They discuss the war in Gaza, Israel's apparent lack of a strategy, the ICC decision to seek warrants for PM Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant for war crimes, the anti-Israel bias of the UN system, the spread of anti-semitism on campus and beyond, the return of isolationism of both the left and the right, the prospects for this fall's election and the political failures of the Biden Administration, and the prospects for American resilience in the face of all this darkness. Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Eric hosts Dale Copeland, Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics at UVA and faculty senior fellow at the Miller Center. Dale is the author of A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China, (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2024). They discuss Dale's dynamic realist theory of international relations which seeks to meld "offensive realism" which sees states as power maximizing entities in an anarchic world and "defensive realism" which sees states as acting to modulate power maximizing in order to avoid a spiral into conflict. Dale contrasts this theory to liberal institutional theories that see foreign policies as driven by internal dynamics including ideology. They discuss his account of American foreign policy which sees US statesmen as successful practitioners of realpolitik in a way that has advanced the U.S. national interest and created what Dale calls the "FDR legacy" or the liberal international order over which the U.S. has presided since the end of World War II. They talk about analysts who are either China "pessimists" who believe a conflict between the U.S. and China is unavoidable and China "optimists" who think it may be possible to avoid conflict. They discuss China's tightening relations with Russia, whether or not the U.S.-China relationship will be a bipolar one, whether or not we have seen "peak China," Xi's recent trip to Europe, how one would know enough to conclude that China was a threat that require containment and much more about the U.S.-China relationship. A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China: https://a.co/d/8GWjZVd Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

With Eliot traveling, Eric welcomes back Robert W. Kagan, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and editor at large at the Washington Post, to the show to discuss Kagan's new book, Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart - Again (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024). They discuss the origins of America's liberal tradition in the radicalism of the American Revolution. How the American Revolution differed from the French, the persistence of an anti-liberal tradition that from its inception was wrapped up with the defense of slavery and white supremacy. The persistence of that anti-liberal tradition in the 19th Century, today's Catholic integralism and Christian nationalism and the tensions between those schools of thought. The connections between anti-liberalism and America First and the connection to anti-semitism, left-wing anti-liberalism and the from whence the threat to American democracy is greatist, the stakes in the 2024 election and the global struggle against liberal democracy by Russian and Chinese autocrats. Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart--Again: https://a.co/d/hkh6fxJ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/06/china-russia-republican-party-relations/678271/ 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 welcome Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest, non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center, and author of America Last: The Right's Century Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. They discuss the origin story of "America First" during the First World War when critic and satirist H.L. Mencken and German-American propagandist (and paid agent) George Sylvester Viereck led the charge against American intervention in the Great War and how both played roles in the 30s and early 40s America First movement to prevent FDR from aiding the Allies. They discuss the hostility of America Firsters to the liberal tradition in America, its connection to anti-Semitism, William F. Buckley's role and evolution on anti-Semitism, Jeanne Kirkpatrick's views on authoritarianism and totalitarianism and the left's own tradition of admiration for tyrants as well as how these tendencies are reflected in today's MAGA movement. America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators https://a.co/d/91qv3YA Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.