Carnegie Council Podcasts

U.S.-Taiwan relations have long been an ingenious balancing act of "strategic ambiguity." What does the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act entail and why is it important, not only to Taiwan, but to U.S.-China relations and indeed security across Asia? Legendary China expert Jerome Cohen unpacks the history of Taiwan since 1895, its current situation and legal status, and what this could mean for Asia and the United States.

"There are areas where China lags behind other countries in its power, areas where it's catching up, and areas where China really has leapfrogged some other countries, including the United States, and is pulling ahead," says Bonnie Glaser of CSIS. Certainly, China is investing heavily in promoting a favorable narrative about China around the world, a strategy increasingly being referred to as "political influence operations."

Quinnipiac's Sujata Gadkar-Wilcox discusses her work researching the conception of human rights in a community in rural India. She tells the story of Chaya Kakade, a woman who went on a hunger strike after the Indian government proposed a tax on sanitary napkins, and has since built her own production center in Latur. How does Kakade understand human rights? How can Westerners move beyond a legalistic view of the concept?

"The rise of China is not the biggest story in the world," says Parag Khanna. "The Asianization of Asia, the return of Asia, the rise of the Asian system, is the biggest story in the world." This new Asian system, where business, technology, globalization, and geopolitics are intertwined, stretches from Japan to Saudi Arabia, from Australia to Russia, and Indonesia to Turkey, linking 5 billion people.

How is China influencing democracies such as Taiwan, Korea, and the United States? "I think there are three areas that you can look at," says Asia security analyst Rachael Burton. "The first is narrative dominance, which I would call a form of cognitive warfare. Beijing has been able to set the terms of debate . . . and once you're asking the questions, then you're able to drive intellectuals or policymakers to a certain answer."

In this episode of The Crack-Up series, which explores how 1919 shaped the modern world, film historian David Bordwell discusses two big changes in the American film industry in 1919: the revolt of film stars against the powerful studio system, and Paramount's response, which was to try and control the "product" from creation to point of consumption. He goes on to look at how these creative and commercial tensions still play out today.

Ambassador Sidi Omar, UN representative for Frente POLISARIO, a liberation movement aiming to secure the independence of Western Sahara, discusses the decades-long dispute in Northwest Africa. With negotiations ongoing between Frente POLISARIO and Morocco at the UN, could there be a resolution? How do Europe and the Trump administration fit in?

The Supreme Court's 1919 decision in "Schenck v. United States" is one of the most important free speech cases in American history. Because of it we have an elaborate set of free speech laws and norms, but the context is always shifting. In this fascinating talk Bollinger and Stone explore how our understanding of the First Amendment has been transformed over time, and how it may change in the future to cope with social media and other challenges.

As founder and executive director of The Polis Project, a research and journalism organization, Suchitra Vijayan is helping to document a concerning trend of identity-based violence in India. She discusses her organization's work on this issue, the violence's connection to a rise in nationalism in India since Prime Minister Modi came to power, and some imperfect parallels with the contentious political climate in the United States.

In the third podcast in The Crack-Up series, which looks at how 1919 shaped the modern world, Ted Widmer discusses the story of the Irish Declaration of Independence with fellow historian Christopher Pastore. Although the declaration was signed in 1919, Ireland's quest for self-determination would last for decades. How did America influence these developments? What did the Irish leaders think about nationalism so soon after World War I?