Just a month after Bashar al-Assad fell in Syria, the country is in the midst of a swirl of regional diplomacy. The new Syrian foreign minister is on another regional swing, and the foreign ministers of Germany and France visited Damascus. A central question is when and how the comprehensive sanctions placed on Syria during a half-century of Assad family rule will be lifted. Asher Grant-Sasson speaks with Jon Alterman, director of the CSIS Middle East Program, about the prospects for these diplomatic efforts and what their results might signal about Syria’s future.

Mike hosts Nadia Schadlow, former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy in the Trump administration and current Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and Co-Chair of the Hamilton Commission on Securing America’s National Security Innovation Base, to discuss balance of power, national security strategy, overmatching, and risk

In this episode of Pekingology which originally aired on June 17, 2021, Freeman Chair in China Studies Jude Blanchette is joined by Wang Yuhua, the Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University, to discuss how rulers in Imperial China maintained -- and lost -- political power. 

In this episode, we discuss the December 2nd semiconductor export control update (0:45), the Trump administration’s appointment of David Sacks as the White House AI czar (5:35), the OpenAI and Anduril partnership and its implication for national security (9:31), and the latest from China’s autonomous fighter aircraft program (16:39).  

This week Mike hosts Richard Heydarian, Senior Lecturer at the University of the Philippines Asian Center and author of, among others, Asia’s New Battlefield (2015, Bloomsbury) & The Indo-Pacific: Trump, China & The New Struggle for Global Mastery (2019, Palgrave), to discuss the Philippines' foreign policy, relationships, and strategy in the Indo-Pacific. 

This week on Babel, Jon Alterman speaks with Will Todman and Natasha Hall, senior fellows at the CSIS Middle East Program, for a special episode on the sudden collapse of the Assad regime and what will replace it. Together, they discuss the promise and peril of this historic moment, and the domestic and regional forces moving aggressively to shape Syria’s new direction. 

On this week's episode of the Trade Guys, we discuss what the incoming U.S. administration will mean for the future of the World Trade Organization. We also dive into a new study on “The Rise of US Economic Sanctions on China” from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, as well as the relaxation of export controls on space-related technologies by BIS.

In this episode of Pekingology, originally released on April 8, 2021, Freeman Chair Jude Blanchette is joined by Jessica Teets, then an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at Middlebury College (now Professor at Middlebury College and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Chinese Political Science), to discuss her work on China's evolving governance system. 

This week on Babel, Jon Alterman speaks with Max Gallien, a political scientist specializing in informal and illegal economies and North African politics. He is a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies and the International Centre for Tax and Development at the University of Sussex. Together, they discuss the political, social, and economic functions of smuggling economies in North Africa. Then, Jon continues the conversation with Martin Pimentel and Will Todman to discuss what factors lead Middle Eastern states to ignore, or even condone, smuggling by their citizens.Transcript, "Max Gallien: Black Markets of the Maghreb," CSIS, December 10, 2024.

On this week's episode of the Trade Guys, we look at what we can learn from the full slate of economic cabinet nominees for the incoming administration. We also dive into new export controls from BIS, China's response to the controls, and how Trump's threats of tariffs on Canada and Mexico will play out.