Carnegie Council Podcasts

Asia Society's Isaac Stone Fish is working on a novel set in Pyongyang, but he's also looking for the truth in the "world's most opaque country." Why does he think the North Koreans are acting rationally? What are the possible outcomes if tensions continue to rise between Kim and Trump?

The U.S. and China have fundamentally different priorities regarding the Korean Peninsula, explains Asia expert Rapp-Hooper. "So, by subcontracting North Korea policy to China," she says, "I think the United States is evincing some amount of naïveté on how far Beijing is likely to actually be willing to go."

How should companies strategize in the age of "Brump" (shorthand for Brexit and Trump)? Should they think locally rather than globally? Are trade wars inevitable, and if so, how will they affect countries large and small? Don't miss this analysis from economist Pankaj Ghemawat.

"This has happened before where we've had a great power who is essentially the leader of the international system taking a transactional approach. The closest example would be maybe Bismarck in the 1870s until the eve of World War I. There it worked quite well. . . . The drawbacks of this, of course, are that it is highly unstable."

"I still believe that we're heading toward a renewable resource-based economy. I think that it's inevitable," declares Steven Cohen. How will we get there? A combination of market forces as renewables become cheaper, better technology, and the sharing economy.

Across the world today, there is active hostility towards experts, says Tom Nichols of the U.S. Naval War College, and this is a very dangerous trend. Donald Trump didn't create this, but he certainly weaponized it politically, just as Brexiteers did in the UK.

The result of a war with China? "At best we have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons nobody will use which are badly in need of nation building at home; at worst, we get into a war with a major power that has nuclear weapons."

"Unless we are able to overcome our strategic attention deficit disorder for lack of a better phrase, and unless we are able to not only compete anew economically in the region, but also shape a constructive economic agenda in the region, I fear that that perception of American disengagement will only intensify," says Atlantic Council Fellow Ali Wyne.

The soldier "is at once the most and the least civilized of persons," says Carnegie Council Senior Fellow Reed Bonadonna. In this thoughtful conversation, he discusses his new book; military ethics through the ages; and the relationship between the army, the state, and the culture at large, both past and present.

Waleed Alhariri of the Sana'a Center for Strategic Studies discusses the Center's new report on U.S. covert attacks against al Qaeda and other radical groups in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. He then focuses on Yemen, a nation suffering from internal conflict, intervention by a Saudi-led coalition, and a cholera epidemic. Humanitarian assistance is sorely needed, says Alhariri and explains what the general public can do to help.