Departures with Robert Amsterdam: Recent Episodes
Amsterdam & Partners LLP
International lawyer Robert Amsterdam and other members from the Amsterdam & Partners LLP team host a wide range of special expert guests to discuss leading international political and business issues.
In our latest episode we speak with the author and academic Frank Gerits, whose most recent work explores the history of the intense ideological battle which took place in the 1950s and 1960s for African hearts and minds. His book, The Ideological Scramble for Africa, explores how this competition wasn't just between Cold War superpowers, but among African leaders themselves who were projecting competing visions of what African modernity should look like.
In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Dr. Gerits gives an informed portrait of key figures such as Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, whose revolutionary call for immediate continental unity challenged both colonial powers and fellow African leaders. While leaders like Senegal's Senghor favored maintaining ties with Europe and others promoted regional federations, Nkrumah demanded complete independence and a "Monroe Doctrine for Africa" that would keep the continent out of global power struggles entirely.
Gerits discussess his views on the fascinating psychological dimension of decolonization, showing how Western powers promoted "modernization" programs designed to psychologically transform Africans, while leaders like Nkrumah and intellectuals like Frantz Fanon fought to reclaim African cultural identity. The louder Africans demanded independence, the more Western powers interpreted this as evidence they needed more assistance—a dynamic that continues today.
Be sure to explore our library of past podcast episodes, which include more than a dozen recent books on Africa.
Following an early Spring hiatus, we're pleased to bring the Departures podcast back with a very special guest, the Canadian author and Adjunct Fellow at the Manhattan Institute Eric Kaufmann.
Eric joins Robert Amsterdam to discuss his interesting new book "Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution."
Kaufmann argues that the anti-racism taboo established in the mid-1960s became the "Big Bang of our moral universe," giving immense power to those who wield it. The conversation explores how progressive moral foundations focused solely on equality and care have created policy failures, how expanding definitions of racism have failed to protect minorities but instead serve to silence debate, and why self-censorship today exceeds that of the McCarthy era.
Kaufmann's work examines the implications of these cultural shifts on institutions, free speech, and political discourse while offering thoughts on potential solutions, including recent American political developments.
Issues of religious freedom, in theory, should not be controversial or disputed - there is a general consensus among public opinion that all peoples should have the right to worship according to their beliefs. And yet, it seems that we are going backwards on this basic right, with governments and political parties all around the world seeking to weaponize divides among faith communities to their partisan advantages and dubious agendas.
This week on Departures we are very privileged to have the special guest Robert Destro, law professor at the Columbus School of Law of Catholic University, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at State Department from 2019-2021.
Destro discusses with host Robert Amsterdam many of the global challenges he faced in his official role in the previous administration, from China to the Middle East, as well as the Ukrainian government's campaign of persecution against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. (Disclosure: Robert Amsterdam is an international lawyer representing the UOC).
The Muslim world, despite its sprawling and complex history, is largely understood by outsiders to fall within the Shia or Sunni category, or among the conflict between. This is not just misleading, but also obscures a much more fascinating and colorful human history of the Middle East which continues to shape events today.
In this episode of Departures with Robert Amsterdam, we're pleased to feature Barnaby Rogerson, the author of "The House Divided: Sunni, Shia and the Making of the Middle East." Rogerson, who is a seasoned British author, television presenter and publisher explores these complex themes and history, sharing stories dating back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, the accidental coup against his son, and fast forwarding right up to the Iranian revolution to draw insights on the religious cleavages which have taken root in the region in modern times.
The imposition of economic sanctions has become Washington's preferred method of expressing disapproval over the conduct of other states. But how effective are sanctions in changing behavior or achieving desired outcomes?
This week on Departures with Robert Amsterdam, we are pleased to feature the brilliant former diplomat Vali Nasr, the Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies and International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC. Professor Nasr is a co-author, along with Narges Vajoghli, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Velez, of the book How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare.
In this insightful conversation, Nasr explores why Iran serves as a pivotal case study for understanding the role of sanctions in foreign policy, their limitations, and why they often fail to deliver the intended results. He also shares his expert perspectives on several critical geopolitical developments, including Israel's Gaza offensive, the fall of the Assad regime, and the internal dynamics within the Islamic Republic.
There's an old Soviet joke that goes something like "the future is certain; it's the past that is unpredictable" which continues to have an eerie resonance today, as revisionism seems to be on a constant assault against past events which are challenging or complex for some people to accept based on modern social mores and values.
In his new book, "The War Against the Past: Why The West Must Fight For Its History," the renowned sociologist Frank Furedi takes aim at those commiting these acts of cultural vandalism and denounces, in quite strong terms, the damage and disservice they are doing to our society by projecting these modern sensibilities upon the historical record.
In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Furedi expands on his thesis and delves into some of the examples of victimhood and "grievance entrepreneurs" surrounding the twisting of narratives from events more than two centuries ago. When the past is rendered toxic, Furedi argues, we begin to live in an inhumane society, one where time is divided into a bad past and a rightly engineered future, and which splits people into shamefaced identities and victim identities. The author makes a call to arms to fight back, to celebrate heroes, to stop apologizing, and to embrace history, warts and all.
Throughtout the post-colonial period in Africa, there has been no shortage of economists, non-governmental organizations, diplomats, and aid organizations flying in from the United States and Western Europe with an astonishing array of prescriptions and reform plans to dramatically transform the economies and governance structures of these young nations. With few exceptions, these interventions failed miserably, and arguably made things much worse in a number of countries.
This is the focus of Bronwen Everill's new book, "Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance and African Economics," which explores the history of how the well intentioned foreigners often "enforced specifically Western ideas about growth, wealth, debt, unemployment, inflation, women’s work and more, and used Western metrics to find African countries wanting."
In this discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Dr. Everill discusses the findings of her book, explores how new players such as China and Russia are now taking over influence in the region, and what the future role should be for collaborative economic development and trade with the region.
A popular meme in Kenya goes something like this: everytime China visits, we get a hospital. When the US visits, we get a lecture.
That's of course not an accurate picture of the competition between the West and China in the global South, but it does highlight a certain disconnect that can be perceived widely among many in these regions which have been included in the Belt and Road projects, or who have otherwise fallen out of favor in terms of their previous allies.
This week on Departures we are pleased to feature a conversation with the author Dr. Oriana Skylar Mastro, a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Courtesy Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. Dr. Mastro's new book, "Upstart: How China Became a Great Power," is a tour de force examining how China was able to climb to great power status through a careful mix of strategic emulation, exploitation, and entrepreneurship on the international stage - which ended up being not so different from a startup business aiming to disrupt a ringfenced status quo.
Dr. Mastro's book is enormously helpful in challenging how we understand China's success and aims to offer insights on how the response from Washington and other Western allies to adjust to the geopolitical realities that lie beyond the newspaper headlines.
What does it mean to perceive reality? How do art, science, and philosophy converge in shaping our understanding of the world? In this episode of Departures with Robert Amsterdam, we sit down with William Egginton, acclaimed author and professor, to dive into his latest book, "The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality."
Egginton weaves a captivating narrative that bridges the literary genius of Jorge Luis Borges, the groundbreaking physics of Werner Heisenberg, the poetry of Robert Frost, and the profound philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Egginton explores how these thinkers confronted the boundaries of human knowledge, the mysteries of perception, and the paradoxes of existence, fate, and choice.
In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Egginton shares his insights into the unexpected connections and overlapping themes with these towering figures, the questions they asked, and how their ideas resonate with our quest to make sense of an increasingly complex universe. The remarkable harmony between nature, science, art, philosophy and literature during these critical years resonated deeply with us, and we hope you enjoy this conversation about this special book.
As this coming February will mark the third anniversary of Russia's invasion and occupation of Eastern Ukraine, there is already a clear and tangible impact upon the geopolitical challenges faced by the United States and her allies in Europe in terms of their roles in the international system.
This week Departures with Robert Amsterdam is pleased to welcome back past guest Michael Kimmage, noted historian, former State Department official, and Associate Professor of History at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. In this conversation we review his excellent new book, "Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability," which critically examines the contributing causes to the outbreak of the war and measures the irrevocable ways in which the conflict has altered the course of US strategic engagement in the international sphere.
In his book, Kimmage argues that the war has shattered three critical assumptions - that European peace was permanent, that Europe could continue to sustain this stability without heavy US involvement, and lastly, that Russia would be consigned to a peripheral role. With those assumptions now gone, Kimmage and host Robert Amsterdam discuss what we can expect next.
In a week in which most eyes are on the US election, there are other meaningful elections which also merit close examination.
On October 27 Japanese voters expressed their pent-up frustration with the growing list of scandals associated with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and ended the party's near 70-year long rule. LDP and their partner Komeito failed to reach a majority in the lower house of the Diet, earning just 215 seats out of 465. With most of the other ascendent parties refusing to enter into coalitions with LDP, the new Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru faces serious vulnerabilities to his agenda, and for the first time in decades, a new level of uncertainty has been introduced to Washington's top ally in Northeast Asia.
The reality, however, is altogether much more subtle in terms of what Japanese voters are saying. This week we welcome back Tobias Harris, who is the founder of political risk advisory firm Japan Foresight and the author of the Observing Japan substack. Tobias last appeared on Departures in 2020 to discuss his excellent book, "The Iconoclast: Shinzo Abe and the New Japan."
As the war in Ukraine grinds into yet another brutal winter, narratives are shifting in Western capitals regarding the nature of the conflict, its goals, and the longer term meaning of the war in terms of the balance of power on the European continent. Looking back to the war's origins, it is important not only to examine the build-up of Russia's aggression against the sovereignty of its neighboring states, but also the decades of miscalculations and lost opportunities specifically by the United States during the post-Cold War period.
This is the central focus of the new book published by Jonathan Haslam, Professor Emeritus of the History of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and one of the UK’s most distinguished and respected experts on the former Soviet Union.
In his latest book, "Hubris: The American Origins of Russia's War against Ukraine," Haslam observes that a gross and systemic lack of understanding by Western allies concerning Russia’s intentions and likely actions is ultimately to blame for the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War. In this discussion with Robert Amsterdam about the history of NATO expansion and covert US activity within Ukraine, Haslam argues that even up to the Maidan crisis of 2014, the US could have backed away and avoided the negative outcome which will be dealing with for generations.
Perhaps one of the most meaningful facts that illustrates the sweeping changes taking place in global affairs is the following: In 1950, nearly one in three people in the world lived in a Western country. By 2050, that number will dwindle to one in ten, bringing with it a wide variety of recalculations by companies, culture, influence, and politics.
This demographic change is but one of many interesting pillars supporting the arguments of the Singapore-based political scientist Samir Puri, whose new book, "Westlessness: The Great Global Rebalancing" explores how the gradually diminishing power of the West is mapped onto geoeconomics, technology, popular culture, and identity.
In this conversation with host Robert Amsterdam, Puri makes it clear that it is not a total replacement or dislocation of the West from global affairs we will be confronted with, but rather a realignment that has been decades in the making. Puri points to the global economic crisis of 2008 as one of several turning points, when the West's confidence in its economic supremacy began to crack, but also discusses sweeping changes to technology and popular entertainment and global commerce that indicate how the next several decades are quite unlikely to resemble the apex of Western power in postwar period.
The modern world's bottomless demand for precious metals originating in the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo is covered daily in the news, from the supply chains underpinning the most common consumer electronics in our pockets to the most critical national security and future energy questions. But rarely are these extractive industries understood from the perspective of the people most directly involved on the ground.
In his excellent new book, "The Eyes of the World: Mining the Digital Age in the Eastern DR Congo," University of California Davis Professor James H. Smith explores how policy changes in the West aimed at eliminating blood minerals ended up engineering catastrophic civil conflicts and upended social frameworks. In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Dr. Smith shares how his ethnographic research informs on a different aspect of the digital age than what we are ordinarily confronted with, bringing light to the understanding of their role in global capitalism from those who dig the minerals from the ground to those who sell, process, and refine them.
Following the end of World War II, Josef Stalin and Russia's leadership had a certain vision of the postwar order, one which ended up being quite different from reality. They had expected to maintain control over the whole of Europe, and have these gains of war legitimized and recognized by the United States - with specific emphasis on the carve up of territory concluded in the Yalta conference of 1945. But these burning ambitions for global power continued long after in the Khruschev and Brezhnev eras and came to define the cold war.
On this week's episode of Departures we are very excited to feature the noted historian Sergey Radchenko, whose book, "To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power," is a tour de force detailing the history of Kremlin thinking throughout this critical period.
With a strong focus on archival sources, Radchenko avoids ideological framing in his analysis of Kremlin decision-making, focusing instead on some of the surprising motivations and long-held beliefs of Russian leadership, prompting decisions which eventually turned the tide of US and global opinion against detente. Radchenko's book leaves open a number of questions about Russia's unmet desire for recognition on the global stage, many of which continue to provide relevant insight into Vladimir Putin's current appetite for war.
In the early 19th century, the Ottoman empire was facing rebellion, decline, and increasing competition for influence with Europe. The leadership in Istanbul implemented desperate plans to preserve the empire through modernizing reforms, known as Tanzimat, which among other measures declared Muslims, Christians, and Jews to be equal under the law. But things did not go as planned.
In Eugene Rogan's richly colorful and kaleidoscopic account, "The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East," the reader is taken deep inside the conspiratorial series of events that led up to the eight-day-long mob violence and execution of some 5,000 Christians, and the world-changing response to restore peace and order to the city.
Drawing on original never before seen historical documents and eyewitness accounts, Rogan's narrative reads like a dramatic Hollywood film, focusing on how resentment over growing Christian wealth and trade eventually prompted the violence. With detailed portraits of some of the main protagonists, the book makes a strong case for 1860 as a pivotal turning point that led to much of the structures that can continue to be observed in the modern Middle East.
There is a certain trend of narratives regarding the Russia's invasion of Ukraine that are understood as gospel in the West. And when analysts or academics stray outside those narrative lines, they are targeted with intolerance and all sorts of unfounded accusations. The fact is that we don't seem to be able capable of a wide range of debate of events in Ukraine during wartime given the extraordinary stakes of the conflict and the immoral, expansionist violence propagated by Vladimir Putin's Kremlin. But this extreme position robs of further understanding.
This week's Departures podcast features Glenn Diesen, a Norwegian professor of political science and the author of "The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order." In this conversation with host Robert Amsterdam, Prof. Diesen discusses Russia's war in Ukraine from different perspectives, seeking to understand how the conflict has placed new pressures on the international order. Diesen argues that we have entered into a period of absolutism, with social divisions being ignored within Ukraine, and both Russia and the United States increasingly acting within a zero-sum game of total victory or total defeat which disincentivizes peace, which is very unfortnate and very dangerous for the wider world.
The tremendous velocity with which modernity and technology has encroached on our social lives is underappreciated, shaping our understanding not only of critical events but also ourselves, as the world is flattened. A teenager in France or Brazil may see violent footage of the Ukraine war fed to them on TikTok, only to be replaced a moment later with dancing, music, and comedy, whatever they want - to the point that nothing matters, there is a lack of reaction, and there are no clear system of signals of do's and don'ts, and our society becomes untethered from collective community and public live.
These are some of the questions that the renowned French intellectual Olivier Roy wrestles with in his fascinating new book, "The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms."
In this interview with Robert Amsterdam, Dr. Roy discusses how in modern culture people no longer seek meaning, no longer seek explanation, and how there is no longer any desire to think in terms of values. The perceived correlation of two disparate events or traits is simply accepted with interrogation, the very concept of meaning is missing, and this presents a psychological crisis, Roy argues.
In the absence of a shared culture, identity gets whittled down to a handful of traits, and everything becomes an explicit code of how to speak and how to act. And this becomes the driving engine of the politics of culture, polarization, and, in some cases, political extremism.
On this week's episode of Departures with Robert Amsterdam we're pleased to invite our friend and colleague of many years Jakob Edberg, the co-founder of The GR Company, a government relations consultancy headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, and with offices in Osaka, Seoul, London, and Washington DC.
Jakob's unique perspective on the rapidly evolving leadership role of Japan in the region and, increasingly, in global affairs are shaped by more than 20 years of experience advising some of the world's largest companies on politically sensitive matters in the region.
According to Edberg, Japan's new role as a primary actor and top ally of the United States has been an intentional and gradual process dating back to before Shinzo Abe's ascedency and the current diplomacy-forward administration of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
Among the slew of books that have come out recently on the war in Ukraine, there are few which take as broad a scope of the human experience of the soldiers, victims, and communities living on the front than the latest entry written by the war correspondent Christopher Miller.
In his book, "The War Came To Us: Life and Death in Ukraine," Miller bears witness to the brutality of this remarkable, unprecedented conflict, bringing the stories of those involved with profound empathy and vivid detail - not only from pivotal scenes on the front, but also going back more than a decade to the seeds of the war, the meaning of Ukraine's struggle for nationhood, and the propulsive resilience that binds the survivors from Bucha to Bakhmut and Mariupol and beyond.
In this conversation about his book with Departures host Robert Amsterdam, the FT correspondent comments: "I think this is a war that is more black and white than any war we have experienced since the Second World War. I do think this is a war that is more 'good vs. evil' than anything we have seen in the last 80 years."
In explaining his approach to war reporting and the complexity of objectivity in the midst of violent conflict, Miller comments: "I think it is powerful enough in some cases to explain what you are witnessing. In the book, I was able to do some things that I am not able to do in my daily reporting, which is to provide some context, some personal context and analysis based on my personal experiences and knowledge. (...) I do try to separate myself from the events, but there are moments where you just can't. Sometimes you do have to help, sometimes that means carrying someone. (...) At that point you can't say, 'sorry, I am a reporter.'"
A truly outstanding book from one of the greatest young war correspondents of our current era, we hope that listeners of Departures will pick up a copy.
From the late-nineteenth century until the mid-1930s, Vienna was Europe's undisputed powerhouse of ideas. But along with the exhilirating achievements of Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, and Klimt, there were also darker forces emerging in parallel which have had their own negative impact on modernity, from organized anti-Semitism to ethnonationalism ideologies.
These complex tensions are explored in detail in Richard Cockett's excellent new book, "Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World." In this discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Cockett explains how the Habsburg emperor, Franz Joseph, permitted such intellectual flourishing to occur, as the rapid influx of Jews and other groups and their assimilation into the Austrian middle class via commercial and educational success augmented intellectual curiosity, discovery, and experimentation throughout the city. Viennese café and salon culture also helped to foster schools of thought, as students and professors would furiously debate disputed major questions of the day into the wee hours.
The conditions for this fervent intellectual incubation of course was not to last, and we're all aware of what followed. Cockett's thoughtful history of the city in this period highlights what we can learn about encouraging greater intellectual vitality, pluralism, and civilizational development.
The tremendous velocity of history that Ukraine has experienced since independence to the Maidan revolution to the catastrophic war brought on by Russia's aggression often tends to be sold and told in neatly packaged narratives to the West - a heroic tale of a plucky democracy breaking from from the yoke of an authoritarian past. But the reality, as always, is much more nuanced, complex, and messy.
This week we are pleased to feature an interview with Volodymyr Ishchenko, the author of the fascinating collection of essays, "Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War." Ishchenko, a sociologist based at Berlin’s Freie Universität, offers a critical examination of Ukraine's trajectory post-Maidan revolution and asks probing, intimate questions about moral leadership and the future political model that the people of this nation at war are still seeking and negotiating.
While making no excuses for Russia's brutality in the war, in this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Ishchenko brings criticism to bear on the leadership from the left-leaning school of thought, examining the costs of ignoring history, misrepresenting identities, and other factors which have fed the growth of nationalism in Ukraine at the cost of other sectors of the society.
It was just three years ago when the Economist magazine ran a cover story on Taiwan, describing it as "the most dangerous place in the world." With intensifying competition with China and deteriorating global security following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, there are many arguments that continue to support that negative outlook. But that's not the vision for CY Huang, a veteran investment banker with FCC Partners and an expert in the semiconductor industry.
According to Huang, Taiwan benefits from its "Silicon Shield," the principle being that as long as the world needs Taiwan's dominant semiconductor production, Taiwan should be safe from foreign threats - though that level of security is tenuous and dependent on many other factors.
In this fascinating coversation with Robert Amsterdam, CY shares his perspective on the geopolitics of semiconductor production, how the new era of AI is driving demand for more high-end chips which can only be manufactured in certain locations, and the recent history of the island's relations with the mainland.
As the war in Ukraine rages on into its second year, there remains little consensus or understanding of how the conflict could be resolved outside of military outcomes, and a persisting misunderstanding on behalf of the West regarding Ukraine's own internal preexisting social divisions.
This week we're pleased to have a special guest, Dr. Nicolai Petro, a professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island, whose new book, "The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution," tackles these questions with unique literary framing.
The conflict can not be understood merely on an institutional or rational level, but also must be considered in light of the emotional dimensions, Petro argues. Diving into the texts of Greek tragedies, Petro finds numerous illuminating parables from ancient Athenian society which can serve as frameworks to heal deep social trauma and create more just institutions. In this fascinating conversation with host Robert Amsterdam, Petro explores how he got the idea to approach the war from this perspective, how he responds to recent changes in Ukraine since the outbreak of war, and how the country may endeavor to secure its future.
From the Russian Revolution of 1917 to the chaotic disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, there is a dazzling and disorienting array of histories. While many books detail the lives and politics of Soviet leaders, Karl Schlögel invites us to better understand the experience of the country through the lives lived by more common Russians, from the depredations of communal apartments, repression, and violence, to the more prosaic aspects of Soviet life - the relics and rituals of museums, the grandeur and intensity of gigantic public works projects.
In his new book, "The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World," Schlögel, who is one of Germany's most authoritative historians on Russia, presents a history that is not comprehensive or categorical, but instead personal. In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Schlögel discusses his approach to such a vast period with selection of coloful vingettes, taking the reader inside the Soviety experience with extraordinary depth and detail.
There is a strong argument to be made that the root of Palestinian identity can be traced back to the 1936-1939 Great Revolt, which united rival families and communities, melded urban with rural, and joined rich and poor together in a struggle against Zionism and the British Empire.
This is the starting point in Oren Kessler's exquisitely detailed new book, "Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict," which takes the reader inside the earliest days of Jewish migration from Europe during the interwar period, and raises numerous questions about the key events which continue to shape the modern Middle East conflict today.
In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Kessler approaches the protagonists in this history with great care and empathy, and sheds light on the numerous complexities behind critical "what if" moments, from the Balfour Declaration and the White Paper of 1939. In light of the horrific October 7 attacks and the continuing conflict in Gaza, an interrogation of the historical roots of statehood in the region such as Kessler's book are a revelation and education.
Formulated by PRC think tanks in the mid-1990s, China's official slogan of the "peaceful rise" sought to calm Western fears regarding its blossoming economic, military, and political power as the nation resumed an outsized role in global affairs. However the mood did not last long, as in the later years of President Hu Jintao's administration, policies hardened into a more aggressive, militaristic stance, and then was continued by the personalistic regime of President Xi Jinping, as China sought to project power abroad to boost popularity of the regime at home.
There are few people more qualified to examine this period than Susan Shirk, a professor at the University of California San Diego and the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs. In her latest book, "Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise," Shirk takes apart some of the most common myths and narratives held by observers of China - namely that the "peaceful rise" was a deception instead of an intention, but this was not the case.
Shirk explores the numerous and complex domestic factors guiding of Chinese foreign policy, while rejecting the premise that all decisions stem from the personal whims of Xi Jinping and his agenda for Chinese primacy. Xi does not enjoy any sort of full control over China, Shirk argues, but sits atop a complex, competing system of institutional imperatives, such as weiquan (sovereignty rights defence) and weiwen (stability maintenance). These imperatives often produce policies at odds with Xi's preferences, and leave China with a government that shouldn't be considered a rational unitary actor.
In crafting policy responses to China's growing power and influence, Shirk warns against overreacting in ways that weaken the ability of the US to compete. In other words, stay true to the principles of a free and open market democracy.
The state behaves in ways that are not directed by and are sometime at odds with the preferences of the leader, particularly in the areas of , or, broadly, international and domestic security.
She takes a contrary view to those who would locate the source of Beijing’s behaviour purely in terms of Xi Jinping’s mission to centre China on the world stage. Instead, she notes that friction over the same issues analysts now frequently associate with Xi began much earlier than his term. These tensions have worsened under Xi, but they are not merely a product of his leadership. Nor, she argues, is Xi totally in control.
As 2023 draws to a close, it has become increasingly clear that there are profound misunderstandings and misapprehensions running amok in Western media narratives regarding the pecularities of the current state in China. That's precisely why there should be a high level of interest in a book of personal experience, nuanced narrative, and thoughtful observation from a Canadian academic who for a time played a unique role within China's state bureaucracy.
In 2017, Daniel A. Bell was appointed dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University—the first foreign dean of a political science faculty in China’s history. The story of his time in this position is enormously illuminating, highlighting both the immense challenges and also the occasional positives, and told with a certain level of humor and empathy often missing from accounts of politically sensitive jobs in the era of Xi Jinping.
His book, "The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University," is a riotously fun, informative, and eye-opening tour through modern Chinese academia. In his interview with Robert Amsterdam, Bell recounts how if some of his more "constructive" takes on events in China were found to be inconsistent with the predominant narrative, he encountered isolation from Westerners who preferred their current understanding.
In June 2013, the journalist Vincent Bevins found himself covering a mass street protest in São Paulo, originally sparked by a rise in bus fares. As the tear canisters rained town and violent clashes with police began, the protesters began chanting "Love is over. Turkey is here," making a intentional connection to another uprising taking place across the world in Gezi Park in Istanbul. These parallel events, along with other major upheavals such as the Euromaidan movement in Ukraine, mark the highlights of a critical decade in modern history in which more people took place in mass protest events across the world than at any other time. And what we are left with after these disruptive, destabilizing events take place, how it reshapes the state and reconfigures political representation in the aftermath, is quite far from predictable and much less clear in terms of the public understanding of their meaning.
This is the focus of Bevins' excellent new book, "If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution," which ambitiously presents a history of the 2010s, globally, through the lens of popular uprisings and their discontents. Bevins, who also joined the Departures podcast in 2020 to discuss his other book, "The Jakarta Method" (more relevant now than ever, read it!), explains how he wrote If We Burn with distinct openness and neutrality, which allows readers to approach the work from many angles, and draw their own understandings of how these popular uprisings so often failed to produce the outcomes that they aspired to, and what can be learned for the future.
Following the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas terrorists, President Joe Biden began to refer to America's support for the Israeli offensive into Gaza as one that was equally aligned with US support for the war in Ukraine. This was a narrative that proposed that in both cases evil forces had attacked the innocent, and that it was America's role to help them both defend themselves.
But the analogy is only partly legitimate, and also opens up room for quite a lot of criticism of the direction of American foreign policy generally in the post Cold War period. This brings up difficult questions about what Washington is trying to accomplish in these conflicts, and also points to the weakening level of public and moral support for those goals.
Today we are featuring a very special and distinguished guest, Samuel Moyn, who is the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Moyn is the author of the recent book, "Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War."
During this podcast interview, we discuss his most recent article for Prospect Magazine, titled, "America’s undoing."
That article can be viewed here: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/united-states/64135/americas-undoing
As Russia's conflict with Ukraine grinds deep into year 2, there are signals of impatience and exhaustion among the country's key supporters in the United States and Europe, and increasing chatter about "stalemate" and pushing Kyiv to the negotiating table. But even for the staunch isolationists who view the outcome of the conflict through the short-term lens, there are deep and profound implications for the future of the global economic system at stake, argues journalist Maximilian Hess in a new book.
Hess's new book, "Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict between Russia and the West," does not dwell long on the political motivations or the strategic calculations of the military conflict, but instead focuses on how the response after the 2014 annexation of Crimea prompted a rapid expansion of sanctions, trade disputes, and barrage of financial weapons between Russia and the West.
These tensions have escalated to the point that the current war shouldn't be viewed so narrowly as merely a land grab or a NATO-phobia in Moscow. Instead its meaning is much broader. it should be seen as a war against the primacy of the US dollar, the Bretton Woods system, and the overall economic order which has guided commercial relations among nations for the past half century. The response to the February invasion, beyond providing assistance for Ukraine to defend its sovereignty, has been to collectively punish Russia and damage its economy - a strategy that is loaded with future liabilities.
"Even if one doesn't accept all those arguments, or is a US isolationist, the argument I try to put forward is that if we lose this war, particularly if it then drives a wedge between the United States and Europe, that will be the beginning of the end of the international economic order which not only the West but so much of the world has benefitted from," argues Hess in this interview with Robert Amsterdam.
The early period of the Cold War in Africa includes some of the most shocking episodes of foreign intervention by the US Central Intelligence Agency, to the point that many of these histories would seem a bit too farfetched for Hollywood.
Such was the chaos in 1960-1961, right around the time that Congo achieved its independence from Belgium. American and Soviet paranoia was an all-time high. Sidney Gottlieb, a CIA scientist who would later become famous for his LSD mind control experiments, found himself meeting with the station chief in Léopoldville carrying vials of poison, with a promising young head of state named Patrice Lumumba viewed as a potential threat.
This is the incredible tale explored in rapturous detail in the new book by Foreign Affairs editor Stuart A. Reid, "The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination." Reid's book presents one of the most compelling narratives from this period of time, tracing the involvement of the CIA before, during and after the chaos surrounding the assassination of Congo's first Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, an event which would send Congo on a sharply different path of misgovernance and squandered opportunity for less than clear benefits.
In his conversation with Amsterdam, Reid discusses his process of writing the book and some of the most surprising revelations, from Soviet incompetence to American miscalculation, and the catastrophic outcomes which followed.
In an increasingly complex and fractured international system, the norms and expectations of how nations and markets interact is changing from one era into the next before our very eyes.
That is the main focus of inquiry for Gary Gerstle, whose new book, "The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era," chronicles the 50 years of primacy of neoliberal thought in American politics before crashing onto the rocks of new ideological movements with the emergence of Donald Trump-style authoritarianism and Bernie Sanders-style anti-capitalism.
In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Gerstle, who is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge and the winner of the "Book of the Year" by the Financial Times, explains that not everything that happens in politics can be understood in short election cycle periods, but instead we should be looking at the overall conceptions of political economy and the order these beliefs sustain.
Pointing to continuities of these orders, such as Eisenhower carrying on the New Deal system and Bill Clinton carrying forward with many core assumptions about trade inherited from Reagan, Gerstle argues we are in a moment of fragility and uncertainty, as once marginal voices in Sanders and Trump have now entered the mainstream. We are without a political order currently, and neither is democracy in a healthy state of competition, so what shall emerge next is unlikely to look similar to the past, as both left and right have lashed out against the free movement of capital, free movement of people, and both have different ideas of the role of the state in economic and social affairs.
This week we're doing something different at Departures - Robert Amsterdam surrenders the host chair and joins as the interviewee to discuss Amsterdam & Partners LLP engagement on behalf of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is facing an existential threat following the Rada's passage of Draft Law 8371. Amsterdam discusses how the draft law represents a blatant violation of basic human rights and how this persecution conflicts with Ukraine's EU ambitions.
In the weeks following the October 7 Hamas terror attacks against Israel, Departures with Robert Amsterdam welcomes special guest Prof. Ron Robin, the President of the University of Haifa in Israel, who provides an assessment and analysis of what the country is going threre and what paths we see coming ahead.
Amsterdam and Prof. Robin discuss the absence of governance which has taken root in recent years, the challenges facing a society under strain, as well as the rising tides of international anti-Semitism we've seen in response to the terror attacks.
In October of 1973, Israel's existence as an independent state was shaken to its core when Egyptian and Syrian forces crossed into the Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights, triggering a conflict of sprawling geopolitical scale. This week, in October of 2023, following an unprecedented series of violent terror attacks against Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas, the nation once again finds itself in existential crisis - with similarities to the past conflict too numerous to ignore.
Five decades later, public understanding of the conflict, its causes, and its protagonists is evolving as more and more materials and archives are declassified and made available to researchers. Taking advantage of these incredibly valuable resources comes the first new book on the Yom Kippur War in decades, authored by Uri Kaufman, titled, "Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East."
Speaking with Robert Amsterdam on the Departures podcast, Kaufman explains how the book represents a culmination of 20 years of research, including deep dives into English, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, and German archival source material to draw exceedingly detailed and unforgettable portraits of the main characters who found themselves at the center of the war.
Kaufman also shares his perspective and analysis of the current turmoil and commentary on the complicated political scenario making further escalation likely. The author points out that "the first casualty of war is not truth, although that is a close second. The first casualties are the assumptions you had going into the conflict."
As Russia's catastrophic war in Ukraine lurches its way toward another winter, an interesting debate is emerging regarding some of the fundamental ideas of Russian nationalism which has underpinned Vladimir Putin's casus belli, often including specifically misleading characterizations of history being used as a mobilizing force.
In considering the relative complacency if not broad support for the war among the general public in Russia, there has been a consistent narrative spun out by the state - one of Western conspiracies, distrust, and patriotic duty.
This week on the podcast we welcome Dr. Jade McGlynn, the author of the excellent new book, "Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin's Russia," who has accomplished a seminal work of research on the subject.
In her conversation with host Robert Amsterdam, Dr. McGlynn argues that peope's understanding of the past is becoming a core part of their identity, and this in turn becomes a security issue. "A historical disagreement is not just a historical disagreement, but instead is seen as almost an existential attack," Dr. McGlynn says, and this is a type of mobilization that can be observed in many countries outside of Russia as well.
"Most people want to belong to a community, they want to feel like they have somewhere they belong that can trace its heritage into the past, and feel good about that belonging," McGlynn argues. Unfortunately, many of the more traditional political figures appear to have lost touch with the importance of belonging, she argues, and left this space open for manipulation by demogogues and other extreme forces.
Eastern Europe, from the northernmost reaches of of the Baltics and down to the Balkan statelets strung along the Adriadic Sea, is one of the most perplexing, conflicted, and interesting regions of the world which still today remains the subject of myths and misunderstanding. Since the end of the Cold War, one could say that the region barely exists as a concept except in historical memory - but it also stubbornly clings to numerous shared cultural features and experiences that continue to bind it together.
In historian Jacob Mikanowski's fascinating new book, "Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land," the author tackles a subject of almost impossible proportions and approaches it with a taut, elegiac personal history, painting an unforgettable portrait of the region.
In this conversation with host Robert Amsterdam, Mikanowski discusses how he approached the research of such a challenging and diverse geopolitical subject, sweeping from the dark ages to the more modern political faultlines which have seen bloodshed, barbarism, and incredible human resilience and innovation.
In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, a sweeping transition took place across the international counter-terrorism space. Instead of responding to threats with law enforcement, numerous multilateral bodies instead respond with preemptive actions based on uncertain information - lists of names for sanctions are drawn up, very often directly violating basic due process and rights of individuals.
This week on Departures we are proud to feature Gavin Sullivan, the author of "The Law of the List: UN Counterterrorism Sanctions and the Politics of Global Security Law." In his conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Sullivan discusses how his practice as legal counsel to individuals who had been unproperly listed by the UN Security Council informed his approach to analyzing and defining this sanctions list, and the often devastating impact the clumsy procedure can have on people's lives.
Featuring numerous interviews with officials directly involved in the UN counter terrorism response apparatus, Sullivan's book presents a unique and valuable interdisciplinary study of global security law - law which is constantly changing and evolving before our eyes today.
For more than one thousand years, the Roman Empire ruled over a vast territory that was unprecedented in both scope and scale. When it finally did fall under pressure from barbarian invasions and internal political divisions (among many other factors), many historians argue that the Romans sowed the seeds of their own demise. Is the same set of processes now happening in the West?
The historian Peter Heather and the political economist John Rapley have come together to interrogate this question in their excellent new book, "Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West."
In their discussion with Departures host Robert Amsterdam, Heather and Rapley explain how the forms of antiquity and modernity may have changed dramatically between the fall the of the Roman empire and the current buckling of Western hegemony, but nevertheless, how so many parallels continue to bear truth. Chief among them has been the global pivot towards nationalist populism, with the movement of labor and capital to the periphery, there's been a traditionally destructive rush to preserve the status quo ante.
What may be done about the current trends, as much as they resemble the fall of Rome, remain quite unclear.
George F. Kennan is arguably the most important American diplomat of the modern era, whose "long telegram" and strategy of containment shaped the Cold War and postwar period. And yet, at critical momemts later in his career, he was cast aside and shut out by the instutions he once led.
In his new book, "Kennan: A Life Between Worlds," acclaimed historian Frank Costigliola draws attention to the very interesting and intimate details of his personal life and upbringing, drawing a much more complex and sometimes surprising portrait of America's top diplomat, bringing us inside his thinking and decision making experiences.
In this podcast interview with host Robert Amsterdam, Costigliola explores the intricate web of politics, ideology, and personal struggles that shaped George F. Kennan's rise to prominence, and shares some of his thoughts about Kennan's policy visions which did not come to fruition, and what he might think of current global tensions.
As China and the U.S. increasingly compete for power in key areas of U.S. influence across the Middle East and African continent, competition has grown in linear succession, and is increasingly adversarial. Often cynical of Chinese involvement and intentions, the U.S. points to blunders of the Belt and Road initiative, fears of neocolonialism, and the support of nations of interest that might lead to the resurgence of terrorist groups, as justification for criticisms.
But are Beijing's ambitions really so nefarious?
In her new book, “China's Rise in the Global South: The Middle East, Africa, and Beijing's Alternative World Order,” Dawn Murphy posits that China’s growth in Africa and the Middle East in the post-cold war era, should be understood as evidence of its desire to develop an alternative world order that will allow China to interact with these two regions on its own terms; and that China is mostly cooperative with the liberal order—particularly within the security and military realms.
In this podcast discussion with host Robert Amsterdam, Murphy highlights China's record as a business competitor, its foreign policy approach (including divergence in norms around corruption and political meddling), how its foreign policy plays out in public perception across the globe, and why US policy towards the country seems to remain mostly unchanged across administrations, even when ideologies vary greatly between Democratic and Republican administrations.
There is no historical precedent for a former US president who is facing a more complicated web of both civil and criminal liabilities than Donald Trump, let alone for a former president who again intends to run in the upcoming election. To help sort through this mess and understand what the cases mean and what kind of risks they pose to his candidacy, Departures is pleased to welcome special guest Karen Friedman Agnifilo. Friedman Agnifilo is a deeply experienced lawyer, the host of the Legal AF podcast, a guest legal analyst for CNN and other media, and formerly served as Chief Assistant District Attorney of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
Amid a slew of headlines highlighting Vladimir Putin's efforts to expand Russia's footprint in Africa since the beginning of the Ukraine war, a certain narrative is emerging regarding Moscow's aims, tactics, and results in this crucial but often neglected region.
Is Russia's presence in Africa a threatening menace or merely an empty gesture? As it turns out, it is neither, argues Samuel Ramani, author of the excellent "Russia in Africa: Resurgent Great Power or Bellicose Pretender?"
Emphasizing the long established playbook and historical memory of the Soviet Union's support of decolonization and anti-apartheid stance, Ramani speaks with Robert Amsterdam about the underpinnings of current Russian policy in Africa, based on cyclical themes abadonment and return.
Beyond the recent high profile engagements of Wagner Group in countries such as the Central African Republic, Amsterdam and Ramani discuss the strategic shortcomings of Western sanctions policies, competition and cooperation with China, and intra-elite maneuvering following Yevgeny Prigozhin's criticism of Russian military leadership.
It takes a certain kind of person to become a collaborator for Axis powers during World War II - a level of self-delusion and survival instinct that is off the charts.
In Ian Buruma's latest book, "The Collaborators," he paints in-depth portraits of three such figures - Felix Kersten (masseur to Heinrich Himmler and others in the Nazi elite), Yoshiko Kawashima (a cross-dressing Manchurian princess who spied for the Japanese) and Friedrich Weinreb (the “fixer” whose fellow Jews paid him to secure reprieves from deportation to concentration camps, only to be turned over to Nazi police). The strands that braid these individual's lives together often represent shocking moral failings - but also deeply human experiences.
In his conversation with host Robert Amsterdam, Buruma describes how he approached the structure of writing the book, what drew him to these three seemingly disparate figures, and how often first tellings of history are shrouded in self-deception by the subjects which can translate to common misapprehensions of who they really were.
Democracy, in terms of its branding, has had a fairly rough decade.
Numerous authors we have had on this podcast have highlighted and explained its global decline, discussed the expansion of nationalist movements which have eaten away at rule of law and institutional integrity, and the frustrating resilience of some of the world's most established authoritarian leaders, who seem to weather every storm keep their grip on power intact.
So it's such a refreshing change to pace to receive such a well researched and sharply argued case for optimism for the power of democracy to continue attracting those seeking freedom and opportunity from Charles Dunst in his new book, "Defeating the Dictators: How Democracy Can Prevail in the Age of the Strongman."
Dunst, who is deputy director of research and analytics at The Asia Group and an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), says that he approached his book with the goal of offering a tangible roadmap for combatting autocracy, focusing on practical and commonsense ways that US foreign policy (and foreign policies of other leading Western nations) can be marshalled toward producing better democratic outcomes.
In this spirited discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Dunst explains how he sees immigration playing such a crucial role in helping democracies thrive, and how Washington, despite having to take a nuanced approach in dealing with allies which have hybrid qualities of both democracies and dictatorships, nevertheless has seen clear evidence of the enduring value of its soft power, continuing to be a promoter of rule of law, human rights, and equality.
Before becoming one of the world's most recognizable heads of state, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was a comic actor and entertainer, whose most famous show, "Servant of the People," imagined him in a role he would one day, unbelievably, come to hold in real life.
But how was it possible for someone with so little political experience to unify and mobilize such an intense outpouring of patriotism of his fellow citizens and, arguably, the creation of a new Ukrainian civic identity in response to the Russian invasion?
According to a new book by co-authors Olga Onuch and Henry Hale, Zelensky's rise is one that was paralleled by that of Ukraine's post-Soviet development as a culture and society. In many ways, the authors argue, it could be any Ukrainian president to wear this mantle, as it is a public force. Zelensky is “a product of a Ukrainian culture steeped in the same sense of civic national belonging and duty that he advocates, advances and now symbolizes.”
Henry Hale joins in conversation with Robert Amsterdam about this exciting new book and how they see the conflict playing out with some difficult realities on the horizon.
The gradual breakdown of the prevailing geopolitical order has brought to the fore numerous far right parties and politicians across Western democracy, bringing with them some very old (and very dangerous) tropes of anti-Semitism.
In light of these frightening trends, it is more important than ever for us to confront the often difficult and challenging reality of the Holocaust, how this "irrational emotive energy" allowed it to happen, and also analyze some of the early signals that were ignored.
On this week's episode of Departures, we're pleased to host the accomplished historian Dan Stone of the University of London, whose new book, "The Holocaust: An Unfinished History," takes the reader on a riveting journey into some of the most unforgettable narratives and archival findings, challenging many of the assumptions carried by most of us.
In his conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Stone speaks at length about the Nazi's demonization of Jews as a some sort of root cause of modernity's problems, and how this absurd narrative took hold despite clear evidence of the Jewish community going through their own ideological and cultural splits over many of the same issues.
A fascinating and fresh history of a well known but poorly understood dark period of history, Stone's book brings enlightening arguments with a clear and lucid voice.
The end of slavery in the United States was an arduously complex process, which beyond simply the issues surrounding cultural and social norms, not to mention the conflicts remaining at the end of the Civil War, the dismantling of established racist institutions began with critical cases going through the courts.
In historian Kate Masur's new book, "Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction," this history is explored with unprecedented detail and archival research, bringing to light the stories of the African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws.
Discussing her book on the podcast with Robert Amsterdam, Masur explores the politically courageous pursuit of the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment by the Republican Party, and how the movement’s ideals became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s despite a series of rigged court decisions.
The story of the rise of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1936 is often overshadowed by that of the country's civil war and its entanglement across the other major developments in Europe at the time. But Spanish fascism was also driven by an enduring set of beliefs - which were so thoroughly odious and absurd - that it is a significant challenge to unravel how so many came to support the dictatorship and permit its genocide.
Sir Paul Preston is among the greatest living historians on this period in Spain, and the Departures podcast was fortunate to host him on a discussion of his most recent book, "Architects of Terror: Paranoia, Conspiracy and Anti-Semitism in Franco’s Spain."
In his conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Preston explores the rather insane alleged scheme for world domination by a non-existent "Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik Conspiracy," and how so many people bought into this false propaganda leading to the slaughter of half a million people. Despite the fact that Spain had only a tiny minority of Jews and Freemasons, Franco and his inner circle were ardent believers in this fabricated conspiracy and spread the notion that the survival of Catholic Spain. With this conspiracy, there were also the establishment's economic interests, which required the complete elimination of all Jews.
A harrowing history of a hidden holocaust, Preston's book highlights how so much danger comes with disinformation, and how the most extreme ideologies can enter the mainstream.
Marina Litvinenko has seen a lot in her life.
In 2006, her husband, the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, was assassinated by radioactive poisoning by agents of the Russian government. Her unrelenting quest for justice and answers has led through the courts, the media, and the highest levels of diplomacy - and yet, after all this time, there were people in the UK who still did not heed her warnings about dealing with Vladimir Putin before last year's invasion of Ukraine.
In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Marina discusses her campaign, views and insights on the conflict in Ukraine, and how the West should deal with punishing those around Putin (while avoiding isolation of independent Russian citizens).
The period during which 'Il Duce' Benito Mussolini ruled Italy as prime minister from 1922 to 1943 remains as confusing and contested today as it did during the disastrous postwar years, due mainly to a series of myths about the man, his government, and facism in general.
In the new book from the decorated historian Paul Corner, "Mussolini in Myth and Memory: The First Totalitarian Dictator," the author ruthlessly interrogates these myths, and explores what it means when we have such a large section of the Italian population continue to live in a fictional memory of a past "when the trains ran on time."
Speaking in his interview with Robert Amsterdam, Corner explains that his book is about illusion, about the creation of towering myths. "We don't remember things to get them right," he says, "we remember them to get them wrong."
Addressing the mistaken claims that Mussolini was somehow "strong" and "decisive" in memory, Corner documents all the incredibly inefficiencies, incompetence, corruption, and violence perpetrated by his highly repressive regime during these decades. There was not a sliver of "good governance" in fascist Italy, but a chaotic and intolerant regime which sought power, first under revolutionary socialism before switching to far-right nationalism, and has benefitted improperly from a historical narrative that has wrongly rehabilitated by parties seeking to benefit politically in today's environment.
It may just be a smattering of insignificant rocks and reefs along the Nine-dash line between the Philippines and China, but in recent years this area has become the focus of the world's most complex and dangerous maritime dispute. China's growing influence and willingness to project its will against smaller neighbors and US allies has drawn Washington into a set of intersecting disputes, while placing significant pressure on America's commitment to established international law regarding open seas.
This week on Departures we are pleased to feature Gregory Poling, the Southeast Asia Program and Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. Poling is the author of the new book, "On Dangerous Ground: America's Century in the South China Sea," which offers a detailed and highly engaging history of Washington's involvement in this part of the world and how the current tensions evolved from past unsettled issues.
Poling's book takes issue with the China-centric narrative which has become embedded in the global conversation about these territorial claims, and puts the focus on strategic decisionmaking happening not just in Beijing and Washington, but also among many other smaller neighboring Southeast Asian countries with interests at play.
In the age of information and with growing calls around the world for democracy, Vladimir Putin, Lee Kuan Yew and Alberto Fujimori are redefining what it means to be a dictator in the 21st century. Through the manipulation of information, media, and using censorship, this new breed of despots are covertly monopolizing power under the guise of democracy.
Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman's new book, "Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century," explores these new methods of discipline, postmodern propoganda, and global pillage to control the masses, while counselling the way forward for democracies and the global community at large.
In his discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Guriev explains the difference between spin and fear dictators, and how free societies tendencies towards innovation can save democracy; as well as current political structures in Israel and Georgia, debating how they could be at risk of sliding into this new version of authoritarianism.
His research highlights the importance of current democracies holding themselves accountable for missteps as a means to reduce whataboutism by these dictators for the purpose of mass manipulation.
In international finance, the difference between what is legal and normal and what is criminal and corrupt is often unclear, a disparity made worse by an overlapping series of laws and regulations which in some cases can put U.S. competition at a disadvantage.
These networks of illicit finance, shell corporations, and offshore structures used by global elites to create, move, and conceal vast amounts of wealth is explored in great detail by Prof. Kimberly Kay Hoang in her new book, "Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets."
Hoang's investigation, which involved some 350,000 miles of travel and dozens of field interviews with executives and market players, sheds light on this secretive and poorly understood corner of the global economy.
In her discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Hoang explains how shell corporations can be set up to move funds from statelets like Guernsey, to more well known offshore havens like the Cayman Islands, as well as Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Delaware, among many others. Her investigaiton brings fresh insights to the shortcomings of laws like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which has imposed very high compliance costs on US companies but has done little to halt the activity of other players.
As we approach the one-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a number of journalists and authors have published highly detailed chronicles from the battlefield, stories of resilience and heroism of the Ukrainian resistance, and geopolitical analyses across the spectrum. But quite few of these books view the war through Russian eyes, understanding the thinking that motivated the decision to declare war, and how everything thus far has so clearly defied their expectations.
This week we're pleased to feature the veteran foreign correspondent Owen Matthews, whose new book, "Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine" investigates the historical roots of the conflict from Moscow's perspective, detailing the fog of extreme paranoia around Vladimir Putin and how perceptions of the Western threat and convictions of Ukrainian weakness led the country into disaster.
"What is objectively bad for Russia is not necessarily bad for the siloviki - the men of power around Putin," says Matthews in his conversation with Robert Amsterdam. "Why is that? Because they got the Russia they wanted, they want a Russia that is cut off from the West, with an elite that does not have divided loyalties that does not earn its money in the West or spend its money in the West. (...) They really are convinced that this is a defensive war against Western aggression."
Less than Putin being driven by imperial ambitions to rebuild a new Soviet Union, Matthews sees more evidence of his ethno-nationalist orientation, that he genuinely believes that he is "saving" the Russian speaking world from Western aggression - and from there, a cascading series of miscalculations begin to take shape.
A fascinating book on the world's most pressing geopolitical crisis, Owen Matthews writes with clarity and a personal presence that brings deeper understanding to this most important conflict.
The role of foreign correspondents, especially during times of war, can be extraordinarily important not only in shaping public perceptions and strategic decisionmaking at the highest level, but also in informing on revolutionary shifts in social norms, as these reporters find themselves bringing their personal lives into the public and the newsmaking process into their own relationships.
In Deborah Cohen's kaleidoscopic ensemble biography, "Last Call at the Hotel Imperial," the reader is given unprecedented access to the personal lives of legendary American reporters John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, James Vincent “Jimmy” Sheean and Dorothy Thompson as they reported on the rise of fascism in Europe and the gradual impending horror of what was to come.
In her conversation with Robert Amsterdam about the book, Cohen, who is a history professor at Northwestern University, discusses the incredible intimacy of how her subjects experirenced the cultural changes that were taking place in the background in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Cohen describes it not only as a geopolitical history told through these colorful and glamorous journalists, but a book of personal history, of people discovering that they could not live the way that their parents did, and how the actualization of these new personal freedoms interacted with their careers.
After almost 23 years in power, Russian President Vladimir Putin currently appears more weakened and vulnerable than during any other period of his presidency, thanks in large part to his disastrous decision to invade Ukraine.
On this week's Departures, we bring back the veteran journalist Luke Harding, who for years serving the Guardian's correspondent in Moscow before being expelled. Harding's latest book, "Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival," takes readers on a trip along the various battlefronts of this conflict, bringing rich detail and color to the main protagonists on both sides. As a reporter on the ground in Kyiv when the invasion started, Harding describes the sense of unreality surrounding the war, and the astounding resilience and leadership shown by the Ukrainian people and their leadership in resistance to Russian aggression.
In this discussion with host Robert Amsterdam, Harding shares his views on Putin's health concerns and decisionmaking, how the conflict has reordered global affairs, especially in European security cooperation, and has contributed to a further isolation of an increasingly intolerant, totalitarian state in Russia.
After almost 23 years in power, Russian President Vladimir Putin currently appears more weakened and vulnerable than during any other period of his presidency, thanks in large part to his disastrous decision to invade Ukraine.
On this week's Departures, we bring back the veteran journalist Luke Harding, who for years serving the Guardian's correspondent in Moscow before being expelled. Harding's latest book, "Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival," takes readers on a trip along the various battlefronts of this conflict, bringing rich detail and color to the main protagonists on both sides. As a reporter on the ground in Kyiv when the invasion started, Harding describes the sense of unreality surrounding the war, and the astounding resilience and leadership shown by the Ukrainian people and their leadership in resistance to Russian aggression.
In this discussion with host Robert Amsterdam, Harding shares his views on Putin's health concerns and decisionmaking, how the conflict has reordered global affairs, especially in European security cooperation, and has contributed to a further isolation of an increasingly intolerant, totalitarian state in Russia.
When we talk about the gig economy, we usually are referring to rideshare drivers, errand runners, and all sorts of service industry freelancers. But we rarely think about the freelancers and non-state actors which take part in wars and armed conflict, doing the sometimes violent fighting and often disruptive hacking, as playing a very important role in how some of the world's most intractable competitions for influence develop into hybrid wars and eventually into conventional wars between nation states.
Joining the podcast this week is the author and journalist Anna Arutunyan, whose new book, "Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow's Struggle for Ukraine," explores the myraid ways in which Vladimir Putin's approach to the invasion of Ukraine earlier this year was colored by his history of deploying a chaotic and decentralized network of "rogues, businessmen, enthusiasts, mercenaries and political technologists" into the separatist conflict.
In her discussion with Departures host Robert Amsterdam, Arutunyan offers her vision of Moscow's rationale at the time which led to the decision to invade, how Putin's decisionmaking process left open several blindspots, and what happens when hybrid wars escalate out of control. Arutunyan's book offers surprising insights to many Western readers, drawing the granular relationships between civilians, non-state actors, and the Kremlin, which is often lost in our wider understanding of how Putin’s administration works and how it has strategically approached its war on Ukraine.
Though we often view China's increasingly activist foreign policy in its trade wars, territorial disputes, and frequent collisions with Western states, less attention is paid to its gradual and quiet expansion of influence in the 'Stans of Central Asia.
But it is here, among the populations of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan where one can see the true evolution of the Belt and Road Initiative, and watch the in progress departure of Russian influence over these former Soviet republics which has only accelerated since the war in Ukraine. In this episode of Departures we welcome the Raffaello Pantucci, the co-author along with the late Alexandros Petersen of the remarkably unique book, "Sinostan: China's Inadvertent Empire."
Pantucci and Petersen, the latter of whom was tragically killed in an attack in Afghanistan before the book's publication, underwent more than 10 years of field research and travel to draw this incredibly detailed portrait of the evolution of China's geo-economic footprint in the resource-rich Central Asian basin. With a highly visual narrative story-telling framework, Sinostan offers readers an unprecedented look inside how many Central Asian citizens and officials feel as this accidental empire has been built up around them.
China's recent political history has taken place at breakneck speed. A historic economic transformation, the consolidation of centralized power not seen since Mao, and the eager but then later truculent participation in the global economy. How do we measure this progress and its costs, and how do we measure its shortcomings?
The numbers matter, and they are rarely presented at face value. This is the point of the most recent book by Jeremy Lee Wallace, "Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarianism in China."
Wallace argues that China's system of excessive control has created numerous statistical distortions which lead to numerous blind spots. These blind spots only seem to be expanding in recent years.
In his discussion with host Robert Amsterdam, Wallace talks about how Xi's responses have only made it worse with "aggressive anti-corruption campaigns, reassertion of party authority, and personalization of power--is an attempt fix the problems of the prior system, as well as a hedge against an inability to do so."
When we think of networks of organized crime, we tend to place them in their own category, occupying an "underworld" of its own rules separate from the norms and laws that guide our states operate in societies.
In his new book, "Gangsters and Other Statesmen: Mafias, Separatists, and Torn States in a Globalized World," Danilo Mandić, a political sociologist at Harvard, challenges this assumption and points to numerous examples of crime and criminal networks being interwoven and overlaid on numerous governments and separatist movements, which of course often has a major impact in terms of how these states are formed, how peace is brokered in conflicts, and how national identity is formed.
Mandić's book presents fascinating first-hand field research from some of the world's most contested regions, including disputed territories of Kosovo and South Ossetia, where he was interviewed mobsters, separatists, and policymakers along major smuggling routes. In this interview with Robert Amsterdam, Mandić discusses how often mainstream academic discourse has ignored the influential role of non-state actors in the criminal world, and argues that these groups can be a fateful determinant of state capacity, separatist success, and ethnic conflict.
To celebrate the 150th episode of Departures, we held a live recording with a terrific group of invited guests in London.
We're grateful to John Lough, a former NATO officer, a Senior Vice President at the consultancy Highgate, and the author of the book, "Germany's Russia Problem," who provided introductory remarks.
Our longtime friend and colleague David Satter provided a presentation of his most recent book, "Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union," and responded to questions from the audience.
And we were also fortunate to enjoy a special appearance by Ilya Ponomarev, a Kyiv-based entrepreneur and political advisor, who was able to offer unparalled insights into the conflict and give his take on how Putin is going to respond to the increasing pressures all around him.
The quality of the recording is unfortunately not the best we have had, but we are grateful for the strong showing of listeners who came out for the breakfast forum as well as grateful for all of regular audience listening from afar.
Throughout the global supply chain, there are chokepoints where states and stakeholders exploit an opportunity to extract rents - and this includes nearby the origin of critical minerals, diamonds, and other natural resources in relatively ungoverned areas of Africa such as the Eastern Congo. Peer Schouten, who is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and who has spent years working in the DRC and the Central African Republic, has now published one of the first studies comprehensively documenting these roadblocks, how they are politically managed, and what they mean in terms of funding rebel groups and violent conflicts which have become such a high-profile geopolitical concern.
With more than a decade's worth of field work, Schouten's excellent book, "Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa," challenges a number of longstanding Western presumptions about state formation and conflict in the region. His findings highlight connections between multinational corporations selling you cell phones and electric vehicles with the hyper local economies nearby mining sites, from women-run restaurants and bars to basic state services like healthcare and schools. In this critique, Schouten's book finds much to be desired with efforts by the donor community and foreign governments to restrict trade of goods associated with conflict, finding that rebel groups have easily circumvented such attempts to influence power dynamics. International observers have failed to understand, Schouten argues, that logistics in the region is not characterized by chaos, but instead by “rather consistent rules and logics of control."
Every day in the media we are told that the United States is irreparably polarized. That lines have been drawn, political opinions have been weaponized into tribal identities, and that apart from an ever-slimming section of undecideds, we are locked into this dreadful stalemate.
That's why it's so refreshing to read a more optimistic take on how people can still be persuaded, how hearts and minds can still be won over despite the algorithms and toxicity of our public discourse. Today we're very honored to feature a special guest, the author and journalist Anand Giridharadas, whose new book, "The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy," presents a very thoughtful take on what it takes to make change in US politics at the local level.
We spoke to Anand the morning after the 2022 US midterms, which brought a surprisingly stronger performance from the Democrats than expected in key races, though certainly not universal. In his discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Anand highlights some key takeaways from this election, discusses his research of "deep canvassing" in campaigns, and gives some insights into why so many candidates focus on "mobilizing the faithful rather than wooing the skeptical."
In a space that is usually consumed by anger, rage, and contention, Giridharadas' book offers positivity, making an important argument for candidates, parties, and movements to broaden their outreach, not by diluting their principles but by communicating effectively to include instead of exclude.
With the global economy going through an unprecedented energy transition away from fossil fuels, demand is exploding for critical minerals essential for batteries and electrification, such as copper, cobalt, lithium, and rare earths. Accompanying this demand is a new geopolitical playing field, most commonly dominated by China, taking place in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In his excellent authoritative new book, "Conflict Minerals, Inc.: War, Profit and White Saviourism in Eastern Congo," expert researcher Christoph N. Vogel unpacks the complex causal relationships between so-called "digital minerals" and the corruption and violent conflicts which have radically disrupted stability in the region.
In his conversation with Robert Amsterdam during this episode, Vogel draws from a richly detailed history of colonialism to the formation of the current state to shine a harsh light on failed efforts by Western NGOs and governments, pointing toward new thinking about the sorts of standards which could be implemented that may be more effective in developing safety and stability for the communities living near these incredibly lucrative mineral reserves.
As Xi Jinping concludes the 20th Party Congress and becomes the first Chinese leader to secure a third term, there is arguably no one in a position quite so powerful and influential in global politics. But who is Xi Jinping and what does he really want?
This is the question tackled by two veteran German journalists, Stefan Aust and Adrian Geiges in their terrific new book, "Xi Jinping: The Most Powerful Man in the World."
With clear-eyed analysis which avoids some of the usual pitfalls found in US approaches to China, Aust and Geiges draw a deeply detailed portrait of Xi's rise and the foundations of his ideological drive. In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, the two co-authors discuss the level of risk Xi has encountered by pushing China's growth into a more aggressive, confrontational posture, and debate the various scenarios we can see coming in the new several years as the third term gets underway.
Is Xi Jinping the most powerful political figure in the world? Or are his efforts to secure tighter control at home and project influence abroad more a sign of underlying weakness?
As Xi sails toward an unprecedented third term at the 19th Party Congress in China, Departures is pleased to feature special guest author Frank Dikötter whose new book, "China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower," presents a compelling and detailed portrait of the major events which led us to today.
In his discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Dikötter discusses how China presented its recovery plan on 40 years of economic transformation based on reform and opening up to the world, but finds that there was actually very little reform and even less opening up.
"There's a major misconception that I hope will be corrected when readers go through my book," Dikötter says. The idea that Xi Jinping is some sort of dictator who wants to go back to the Mao period - and if only we could go back to where we were before Xi Jinping, maybe there was a chance for China to develop in a different direction. Highly unlikely, Dikötter argues, as since as far back as 1972 the party has shown a very clear commitment to the monopoly on power and controlling the economic means of production.
"What we are getting from Xi Jinping is hardly a departure from what has happened under other leaders," he says.
Dikötter's rigorous examination of rare government archives makes this book stand out for its detailed and colorful history of this period, and contributes enormously to understanding how the West has failed to anticipate China's vision for the world order.
Some autocracies come and go, but others have a seemingly infinite shelf-life, showing a structural resiliency to any efforts at reform or democratic change that is strong, durable, and long lasting.
More than 20 years ago, the rock star political scientists Lucan Way and Steven Levitsky wrote a paper examining the characteristics of successful autocratic countries, and advanced a hugely influential theory of competitive authoritarianism and hybrid regimes.
Now, in 2022, they are back with a terrific new book called, "Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism," which explores why the violent social revolutions in countries like China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam led to durable regimes.
Co-author Lucan Way, a professor at the University of Toronto, joins the Departures podcast today to discuss the book with Robert Amsterdam, exploring their idea called the "reactive sequence," referring to how the intensity of international reaction and pressure ends up strengthening these regimes. Prof. Way and Amsterdam discuss how this relates to the current predicament of balancing sanctions with accommodation, and how successful foreign policy and support for improving rule and law democracy lies somewhere in between.
The sharpening polarization taking place in the United States over the past several election cycles has gradually calcified the nation's institutions into obstructionist forces which are impeding Washington's ability to project its influence abroad. Now, many are asking, is the United States really the "indispensable" power it perceives itself to be, or are we witnessing the beginning of its abdication?
These are the questions that Michael Cox, an Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics, wrestles with in his fascinating new book, "Agonies of Empire: American Power from Clinton to Biden."
Professor Cox joins Robert Amsterdam on the podcast this week to discuss his study of US foreign policy across the past five presidential administrations, with particular attention paid to the less recognized achievements of geoeconomic statecraft during certain periods followed by less successful doctrines of later presidents.
Cox brings a uniquely British perspective to the ways in which the American people expect their leaders to exercise power, interrogating a number of sweeping presumptions from the cultivation of patriotism, the discontent over globalization (despite benefitting immensely from it), and the strange "parochial-ness" of this lone superpower, and many other interesting questions unearthed across this period of history.
In recent years, the theme of decolonization has become a thriving industry. It dominates academia, it frames historical narratives, and makes its way into the deepest corners politics and culture to the point that it is inescapable. But what has decolonization done for us lately, asks Cornell University Professor Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò in his new polemic, "Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously."
In his conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Táíwò explains how the decolonization narrative lost its way, its meaning, and its purpose when it has been so indiscriminately applied to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. This relatively short period of history, Táíwò says, has been overwhelmingly exaggerated to the point that it has deprived Africans of agency and continues to hamper thought and innovation.
Pointing to the example of South Korea forming a national identity and history in which Japanese colonalism was an episode, not an origin story, Táíwò and Amsterdam also discuss the many ways in which modern authoritarians and despots in Africa use the decolonization narrative to engender further abuses upon their populations.
Táíwò's book challenges traditional thinking, and demands the reader to consider whether today’s ‘decolonization’ truly serves African empowerment, or if we need to broaden our understanding of a more complex history.
Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of the Russian Duma, joins Robert Amsterdam to discuss recent developments in Russia's war in Ukraine and the rapidly diminishing prospects for Vladimir Putin.
To rise to power within the rigidly authoritarian party bureaucracies of the Soviet Union and China is a feat accomplished only with great strategic acumen, backhanded political maneuvering, and, sometimes, with a certain level of violence.
On this week's episode of Departures with Robert Amsterdam we are very pleased to feature Joseph Torigian, an assistant professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington and the author of the new book, "Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao."
Drawing on fresh insights from historical archives and expansive field research, Torigian's book picks apart the commonly assumed myths of how these reformers came to power via intra-party democratic processes and instead highlights the often flawed and aggressive personalities which shaped these elite power dynamics - with more than a few inferences which can apply to today's leadership in Moscow and Beijing.
In the past, when insurgencies challenged the power of the state, they did so from a position of occupying physical territory. But in today's wildly unregulated post-truth environment and hyperconnected society, the space that they occupy is virtual - and most democracies are not well prepared to deal with these often violent threats to the hegemony of representative government.
Dr. David Ucko, a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King's College, has recently published a fascinating new book addressing these issues titled, "The Insurgent's Dilemma: A Struggle to Prevail." Joining Robert Amsterdam in this podcast discussion, Ucko explains how extremist groups have become increasingly successful at challenging the preexisting norms and agreements that societies have, often using clever humor and familiar tropes to "break down the memetic defenses" of their audience and get people to entertain anti-democratic messaging, among other toxic ideological positions.
"The image that my work on infiltrative insurgency conjures up is that of a Trojan horse," said Ucko, drawing comparisons with political parties which have ties to armed wings. "You have a strictly anti-democratic party using the democratic openness of the state to achieve power in the government, but then they follow its anti-democratic agenda to dismantle the system from within."
Amsterdam and Ucko further discuss the challenges of how democracies must attempt to balance the participation of parties which do not pose a threat to the system itself, how democracies can sustain the myth of a nation state while dealing with rampant Russia-sponsored social media campaigns, and how counter-insurgency now has to involve "deeply epistemological questions of trust in authority."
As China approaches the 20th Party Congress to be held at the end of the year, President and CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping is aggressively promoting his government's superhuman achievements and infallible contributions to the glory of the state, making his case for an inevitable third term, and perhaps, leadership for life.
But the problem with long-running leaders of authoritarian systems is that after a while, the people they surround themselves with are no longer the most trusted, the most competent, and the most influential - instead a pattern emerges that the leader prefers to be surrounded by weak, marginal officials who pose no threat to their leadership.
This is the core argument of a fascinating book by Victor Shih of the University of California San Diego called, "Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China from Mao's Stratagem to the Rise of Xi."
In his conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Shih shares fresh insights and fascinating details of the late Mao period based on a deep investigation of archival documents and data, showing how the most well networked officials were pushed aside in favor of politically tainted and incapable functionaries, leading to two generations of weak central leadership - a vaccuum which provided the opening for the rise of Xi.
Today there are currently fewer global citizens living in open and free democratic systems than in 1989, a sobering fact underlining the rapid global expansion of authoritarian regimes around tthe world.
According to Moisés Naím, the world has made itself safer for tyrannical leaders to install themselves, often using the "three Ps" of populism, polarisation and post-truth, putting both fragile and established democracies at risk of extinction.
In Naím's latest book, "The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century," it is argued that these environmental factors of propaganda and polarization are compounded by harsh economic circumstances, including inflation and inequality, placing greater pressure on democracies and raising public discontent with the state, paving the way forward for authoritarian opportunists.
In this podcast conversation with host Robert Amsterdam, Naím discusses and contrasts his experiences in Venezuela with the tragedy of January 6th in Washington DC, and points to the utmost importance of having a well informed citizenry and what can be done to regulate disinformation while exploring what other options should be explored to better protect the world's remaining democracies from tyranny.
“Imagine that all of humanity stands before you and comes to this court and cries. These are our laws, let them prevail.” -Sir Hartley Shawcross, War Crimes Trials, Nuremberg, Germany, July 27, 1946
After discovering a former Nazi who belonged to the same killing unit as her grandfather and was the subject of a posthumous criminal investigation and concurrently a rehabilitation petition in Latvia, author Linda Kinstler began to deconstruct what these laws really mean when people are removed by time and memory from historical truths.
A phenomenal non-fiction debut, in “Come to this Court and Cry” Kinstler explores both her family story and the archives of ten nations, to determine what it takes to prove history in the uncertainty of the 21st century.
In this week’s Departures podcast, Robert Amsterdam and Kinstler discuss the implications of the neoliberal memory boom and unravel the perversions of law, when revisionism, ultra-nationalism and denialism can alter history and open rehabilitation to those who were never formally oppressed. As a new generation reckons with the crimes of the Holocaust and the shadows of the Cold War in a post-truth era, they examine what justice means when we no longer have a shared agreement of the basic facts.
"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," is often a colloquial proverb tossed around to express a reluctant surrender to whatever dominant force one may be facing - but it might also be a decent way to express how many states have found their domestic political options increasingly constrained by in the age of globalization, whereby participation in international commerce binds a national government to the rules and norms of powerful institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
But the question of who gets to set those rules and whose interests the norms favor has continued to be a sore point of contention. In his latest book, "The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance," Harvard historian Jamie Martin examines the birth of the global economic order, and traces back many of its foundational assumptions and ideologies to earlier imperial political conflicts.
Martin's book takes a close look at the major players who shaped the Bretton Woods conference, how they evolved from the post WWI institutions like the League of Nations and Bank for International Settlements, and why they thought it necessary to create rules that could reach over national boundaries to enforce austerity, coordinate the central bank policy, oversee development programs, and regulate commodity prices.
This effort to govern capitalism on a global level is fraught with problems common to most attempts to govern, including aspects of racism, colonialism, and the hubris of empires who believed they were in the best position to dictate decisions on behalf of other nations.
When one thinks of Zimbabwe, the concept of "free and fair elections" is not the first to come to mind. And yet, like many post-Cold War authoritarian states, elections are nevertheless organized and manipulated to produce something adjacent to public legitimacy, which becomes all the more treacherous when the opposition is able to actually win them.
To discuss the rapidly developing situation in Zimbabwe, this week on Departures we are featuring a very special guest, Chenayi Mutambasere. Chenayi is a development economist based in the UK where she is also vice chair of Governors for UTC @MediaCityUK in Salford. She has worked for transformation projects in international banks, local government and the legal sector. Chenayi is a keen researcher and contributor to economic policy research in Zimbabwe.
State repression, whether or not it’s outwardly aggressive, invites backlash. So how does the Chinese state maintain control during disruptive periods of intense urbanization, even as heavy consequences impact society?
This week Departures is pleased to feature a discussion with Lynette Ong, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto about her excellent new book, "Outsourcing Repression Everyday State Power in Contemporary China."
Through the coordination of independent social forces, including thugs and gangsters, local governments across China have successfully repressed the masses in land expropriation cases, and through evictions for demolition projects. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these nonstate actors have morphed into medical personnel and volunteers who are known community members. Ong argues this leveraging of neighbors and familiar faces to enforce the zero covid policy contributes to social compliance amid what are seen as increasingly harsh restrictions on the most basic personal liberties.
In her discussion with host Robert Amsterdam, Prof. Ong discusses the recent zero covid policy and food shortages in Shanghai, where social unrest could be reaching a level unmatched by outsourced repression. Amsterdam and Ong discuss potential structural outcomes for how the party will need to adapt to manage social crises and if the current model experiences such a high profile break down.
War doesn't always look like it used to, with just tanks, missiles, ships, and planes. It also takes place online, and observers in the West are becoming increasingly aware of the need to increase cyber defense capacities as authoritarian states like Iran and China rapidly advance.
This poses important questions for democracies around the world: do open societies have more difficulty in mobilizing cyber defense than closed societies? And if so, why and what can be done to course correct?
In this week's podcast we're pleased to feature special guest John Arquilla, co-founder of the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School, and author of “Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare."
In their discussion, Amsterdam and Arquilla explore these questions and discuss Arquilla's condemnation of U.S. leadership's lack of mobilization towards cyber defense.
Arquilla argues that democracies have become canaries in a coal mine, as their reliance on cyber warfare mechanisms have been delegated to the market-based solutions of Silicon Valley and Boston area tech firms; and watered down legislation in government.
Can the U.S. adopt a more nimble and effective approach to cyber warfare - or will authoritarian regimes continuing their rapid advances to gain the upper hand in cyber in the long run?
Have a listen to the show and get in touch to let us know your thoughts.
Often dismissed as the edge of the Russian or Chinese empires, Central Asia hosts a complex history that informs on present day atrocities including the Russian invasion in Ukraine, and the Uyghur concentration camps in China. It is through these current events, that Central Asia has become one of the most important geopolitical regions in the world.
This week’s episode of Departures features Adeeb Khalid, the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies and History at Carleton College, and author of the book, “Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present."
In their discussion, Bob Amsterdam and Khalid dive deep into historical tensions between Russia and China for influence in Central Asia, particularly as the Belt and Road Initiative and other Chinese directed infrastructure projects take hold; and Russia's once favorable reputation is losing value throughout the region in light of their military attack in Ukraine.
But will Russia's assault on Ukraine create an opening for China to increase its leverage over Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and the region at-large? Tune into this week's episode for expert commentary.
We can all agree that the global world order has become rather disorderly. We also seem to have trouble coming up with consistent and convincing explanations of what brought about this disorder, pointing useless at shocks such as the passage of Brexit to the Trump to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
But for political scientist Helen Thompson, the author of the excellent book, "Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century," the makings of our current geopolitical problems were cast deep in the faultlines of history going back to the end of the Cold War and, more recently, the departure from global economic orthodoxy observed from 2005-2008.
Thompson argues that the process of democratization in many countries did not quite go as planned. There was not a massive enfranchisement of lower classes in many nations - instead we saw the rich and powerful become more rich and powerful, with a greater concentration of wealth and inequality taking place within democratic societies.
"What we see by the 1990s is once again the rise of aristocratic excess," Thompson says in her conversation with Amsterdam. "We can see it in the United States with the growing importance of finance in campaigns and elections. (...) In terms of European countries, this aristocratic excess was primarily shaped through the technocratic elements of the European monetary union."
Thompson argues that the financialization of society laid the faultlines for the disruptive events we are currently experiencing and struggling mightily to overcome. A fascinating conversation with a deep thinker.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, it intervened in Syria in 2015 to shore up the beleaguered regime of their ally, Bashar al-Assad. How did this experience inform upon Vladimir Putin's catastrophic decision to invade and attempt regime change of the democratically elected government in Kyiv?
This week's episode of Departures features Joby Warrick, a Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter for the Washington Post, and author of the book, "Red Line: The Unraveling of Syria and America's Race to Destroy the Most Dangerous Arsenal in the World."
In their conversation, Bob Amsterdam and Joby Warrick discuss the contrasting experiences of Russia's relatively successful military intervention in Syria, with the catastrophic setbacks they have encountered in the invasion of Ukraine, which in recent days has called attention to horrific war crimes committed by the Russian military.
Through the indiscriminate targeting of residential areas and hospitals, Putin's destruction of infrastructure is designed to cripple Ukraine. Instead, the outcome has been devastating for Russian forces. Warrick argues Russia's systems are not just corrupt at the official level, but importantly at the military level, where platoons lack command and control, and forces can't operate ground support for armored battalions.
But do these corrupt institutions explain Russia's failures? Or was the chaos of the Ukraine invasion primarily an issue of poor intelligence and the isolation of the Russian leader? Warrick and Amsterdam debate how the blame falls and how it will make peace negotiations more difficult and more protracted.
We last checked in with former Russian lawmaker Ilya Ponomarev about a month ago, as the Russian military began its invasion of Ukraine. Now, with things looking much different and many things not going to plan, we check back in for Dispatch #2 from inside Ukraine. Ilya Ponomarev, who was forced into self-exile from Russia following his solitary vote against the annexation of Crimea, has spent years living in Kyiv supporting governance efforts and leading new ventures.
As someone who has directly interacted with Vladimir Putin and who has an intimate knowledge of the government's functioning and processing, his analysis of the current situation is both important and alarming.
According to Ponomarev, Putin is a "dead man walking," without option to escape his current predicament, but this of course still makes him very dangerous.
On the disastrous decisionmaking which led to the invasion, Ponomarev points out the Covid-19 pandemic as having severely narrowed Putin's available sources of information, leading him to depend on just two of his most hawkish advisors and relying on numerous low-quality history books which he has frequently cited in statements to media.
What direction will the war take from here? What can be the possible negotiated outcomes? Amsterdam and Ponomarev discuss in detail.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the most resource-rich nations in the world, holding the largest deposits of critical minerals which will be key to the coming industrial transformation. But it is also a nation that is well into its third decade of war - a war that in many ways is forgotten, ignored, and buried away from public attention.
But one person who has been paying attention is Jason Stearns, a Senior Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation and Chair of the Advisory Board of Congo Research Group. In his exhaustively researched excellent new book, "The War That Doesn't Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo," Stearns explores how the conflict has continued despite the 2003 peace agreement, with the fighting becoming a structural economic activity.
In his discussion with Amsterdam, Stearns doesn't hold back on the enabling role he has seen in the donor community, flooding the country with millions of dollars of aid while a narrow elite class has emerged among the military and security bureaucracy while the country has remained mired in war and poverty.
Stearns' sharp and insightful on the crisis in the Congo is informed by more than a decade of experience working there on the ground in human rights organizations, leading him to present very compelling theories of how conflict has subsisted, why peacekeeping efforts have failed, and how we should start to think differently about intervention in Africa writ large.
A highly recommended publication - go pick up a copy.
Ilya Ponomarev is one man who knows the costs of crossing Vladimir Putin. In 2014, he was the only member of the Russian Duma who voted against the annexation of Crimea, and then was forced into political exile, eventually becoming an entrepreneur in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Tonight, as Russian tanks began entering the outer neighborhoods of the Ukrainian capital, we speak with Ilya again to get a sense of how people are preparing for the worst and hoping for the best in this besieged city, and what we can expect to happen in the coming days.
During one specific week in December in 1941, a series of events and calculations led to Adolf Hitler's disastrous decision to declare war on the United States, putting the conflict on the eventual path toward the outcome we now regard with familiarity.
The sequence of events leading from the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan to the entry of the United States into the war were of course very far from clear cut or certain at the time, and instead played out with the high-tension drama of a Hollywood thriller.
The story of what happened during these four days is examined and retold with unusually gripping detail and surprising revelations by historians Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman in their excellent new book, "Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany's March to Global War."
Simms and Laderman's book takes readers inside the blow-by-blow strategic thinking by Hitler and his advisors that led to this momentous and ultimately catastrophic decision with extraordinary and engaging detail, as well as the reaction to events in the Roosevelt White House.
Hitler's American Gamble invites readers to imagine a broad range of potential alternative outcomes which could have taken place during this week, many of which were just avoided by the slimmest of margins. As news of the attack in the Pacific spread, leaders among the various countries did not all have the same access to information or understanding of the meaning of the events - and in the end, it would be these asymmetries that would prove critical.
"100 billion people have lived on planet earth since our species evolved, and for all our archives, all our libraries, and all our museums, we have only the tiniest little sliver of any record of who these people were and what their lives were like," says Jon Grinspan in his conversation with Robert Amsterdam. "So the challenge of history is to live in the present, and try to connect with these human beings who came before us, try to understand what their meaning was."
And it is with this tremendous care and attention to detail that brings all the characters to life in Grinspan's excellent new book, "The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915," which examines one of the most turbulent, polarized period of America's political history.
In their podcast discussion about the book, Grinspan and Amsterdam explore the striking similarities between the late 19th century and more contemporary events in the United States since Donald Trump's takeover of the Republican party, the 2021 insurrection, and the seemingly intractable partisan tribalism prevalent in politics today.
Though many people have described the past five years as "unprecedented" in US history, that's actually not true, argues Grinspan.
There is a deeper history of democracy in America that has been much more contested, he writes, focusing on the characters of radical congressman William “Pig Iron” Kelley and his progressive daughter, Florence Kelley. Looking at this family over the course of a critical half-century, one can see numerous lessons of what it cost the country to exit a period of tremendous dysfunction into a period of relative stability.
As tensions continue to rage between Russia and the West over its build-up on the Ukrainian border, Departures turns to expert Mark Galeotti for his analysis on the situation and a discussion of his brand new book, "The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War."
Galeotti, who has spent years researching and writing about Russian organized crime and the security state, argues that despite the buildup of a traditional military conflict potentially in Ukraine, overall the world is seeing the practice of warfare change. Shooting wars are much too costly, from both an economic and social aspect, and hybrid warfare, disinformation, hacking, assassinations, sanctions, cultural exchanges, and even business and financial press provide a whole new series of battlefronts where rivals may clash.
Galeotti and Amsterdam talk about the limits of sanctions, and why in many cases they don't work against larger nations like Russia. Although politically palatable, making the appearance of action at little cost to the policymaker, it sidesteps issues which are much more important.
Throughout the most recent intensifying conflict between Russia and the West over Ukraine, there is a common assumption that the Russian leadership is wielding its "energy weapon" to break apart European unity and advance its interests.
While that may be partly true, it would be a huge mistake to assume that such a vast industrial chain of inputs, labor, refining, and transportation of these goods lay in the hands of so few people, argues Prof. Margarita Balmaceda in her new book, "Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics From Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union."
In her conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Dr. Balmaceda of Seton Hall University argues that for many, the flow of Russian energy exports of oil, gas, and coal often represent opportunities which are happily exploited more than constraints and threats as energy weapons.
The rise of numerous Ukrainian oligarchs who took advantage of energy transit were able to transfer this to political influence, forever shaping regional dynamics that we can see playing out today, among numerous other examples. Oil and gas certainly are the lifeblood of Russian politics - but it is not a force under the sole discretion of Vladimir Putin.
Several years ago, Hakan Bulgurlu was at the top of his game. He was serving as CEO of Arçelik, a multi-billion dollar corporation. He and his family, including three young children, were enjoying a great life with frequent international travel. But he was also deeply troubled by the raw data he was seeing professionally concerning the rapidly deteriorating climate situation. And when he would speak up about these concerns, he found that people wouldn't listen and wouldn't act. So, he made a momentous decision to prepare himself to summit Mount Everest and bring attention to the cause.
In his new book, "A Mountain to Climb: The Climate Crisis: A Summit Beyond Everest," Bulgurlu takes us deep inside the harrowing details of his trip to Everest in 2019, which turned out to be one of the most deadly years in terms of climber fatalities.
Interspersed with the tale of the expedition, Bulgurlu's book explores the roots of the environmental crisis we find ourselves in, including interviews and commentary from climate activists and campaigners, biologists, scientists, filmmakers, academics, economists, entrepreneurs, global leaders and innovators. In this gripping account of his journey, Bulgurlu describes the challenges he faced in reaching the summit, and the challenges we all face in protecting the planet and the future of humanity.
Forget tanks, missiles, and soldiers. The forms of warfare predominantly being used against the United States today are much more often unconventional and irregular, such as large-scale offensive cyber actions, disinformation campaigns, spying, economic subversion, and smaller armed conflicts via proxies.
This is a deeply worrying trend, argues Seth Jones, author of the terrific book "Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China, Iran and the Rise of Irregular Warfare," because the United States is very poorly prepared to defend itself and is instead still stuck in the old world and over-invested in the means of traditional military conflict.
In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Jones discusses the main findings of his book, exploring various similarities from China to Russia to Iran in terms of how irregular warfare is used and deployed in support of their interests on a daily basis, and how response and countermeasures from Washington have been uninspiring.
Jones and Amsterdam also discuss the problematic disregard the United States has shown toward its allies in recent years and the waning influence of its soft power. Jones argues that there has been a corresponding impact on the challenges of forging successful partnerships to withstand the onslaught of irregular warfare tactics, and the many areas in which the US should look to improve to address these security gaps.
The saber-rattling from Moscow over Ukraine has grown deafening in recent weeks. Hours before we recorded this episode, Vladimir Putin appeared on television threatening "retaliatory military-technical" measures while amassing some 175,000 troops on the border of Ukraine, asserting that Russia "has every right" to invade and start a war. Evelyn Farkas, a former Obama administration defense official, summarized the West's response in a tweet "Putin just declared war on Ukraine (pretending it's war against the US and its allies, provoked by us)."
To get some meaningful insight, we turn to our man in Kyiv, Ilya Ponomarev.
Ilya Ponomarev is a former member of the Russian Duma who most famously was the only member to vote against the annexation of Crimea - an act for which he was effectively expelled from the country.
In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Ponomarev shares his views about the potential scenarios of a second Russian invasion, why he sees the human and military costs as forbiddingly too high, but how nevertheless we are living through an attempt by Putin to cement a legacy and upend the post-Cold War world order.
In early December, the administration of US President Joe Biden convened a mostly virtual democracy summit, in which some of the world's largest economies were invited to participate and provide a clear framing of the agenda - and a clear poke in the eye of China and Russia.
In response, Chinese state media trolled Biden with Harry Potter jokes about the fallibility of democracy as a system, and then went back to their regular efforts to redefine international norms and present its top-down authoritarian system as not just legitimate but ideologically superior to liberal multiparty democracies.
This week we're very excited to have Toronto Star reporter Joanna Chiu join the podcast to discuss her book, "China Unbound: A New World Disorder," which presents eight different case studies of recent tensions and conflicts Western countries have had with China's rise which help illustrate this fundamental question of how Beijing is reacting to a series of challenges.
Chiu's book examines Canada's infamously naive experience with China and the arrest of the "two Michaels," but also looks at the encroachment on Hong Kong, the persecution of underground churches, Australia's economic dependence, and the vast expansion of China's surveillance police state.
Taken altogether, we can see China's drive toward authoritarianism as being shaped from the distrust of past colonial experiences, but the new world order they are creating - with little effective resistance - leaves many questions open.
Faced with challenging and intractable problems from climate change to civil conflicts to terrorism, it is tempting for many of us to look to the heavens, with billionaires pouring their resources into space exploration, expansion, and even dreams of colonization.
But this is a major mistake, argues Professor Daniel Deudney of Johns Hopkins University in his fascinating new book, "'Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity."
Deudney's perspective is that the "space age" race toward developing these technologies has mainly resulted in multiplying risks for the survival of humanity itself, from hypersonic missiles being seen as space weapons, to competition for control and influence far beyond our atmosphere.
"Space is an inherently violent environment," Deudney argues in his conversation with Robert Amsterdam. We are occupying a miraculous oasis of life, an enormously unique and special place, surrounded by trillions of miles of desolate and inhospitable vacuum. In terms of the complex geopolitical questions, our society is very ill-prepared for the conflicts that will be associated with space activity.
The counterintuitive argument of Deudney's book? Forget about space, and get our ship in order here on earth first.
Yoweri Museveni's 35 years of iron-gripped ruthless authoritarianism in Uganda did not take place in a vacuum. It has instead been a years-long process of converting the country's institutions into instruments of arbitrary power, which has been fueled by a series of targeted moves to destabilize the social coordination that would be needed to hold leadership accountable.
This has been the fascinating focus of research for Prof. Rebecca Tapscott, a visiting fellow at the University of Edinburgh's Politics and International Relations Department. She joined the Departures with Robert Amsterdam podcast this week to discuss her book, "Arbitrary States: Social Control and Modern Authoritarianism in Museveni's Uganda."
Tapscott explains that for Uganda, among other countries with nationalist movements which took power, it is crucial that there is a high level of "unpredictability and arbitrariness" which shapes people's experience of how the state works, how they experience security and justice. Her research takes an interesting look into the functioning of hybrid regimes, where some vestigial presence of democratic institutions continue to exist but are largely rendered ineffective in terms of successful opposition organizing.
It was once the dream of starry-eyed proponents of globalization that the increasing pace of trade, travel, and exchanges of ideas would lead to a "borderless" world of reduced conflict and cosmopolitanism. Instead, the opposite has happened, as the lines and demarcations between nations struggling to manage their conflicts have become paramount and subject to escalating risk.
Whether it's China building islands in the South China Sea or Russia seizing the arctic or even the UK having a Northern Ireland problem after Brexit, borders are increasingly becoming more hostile environments. Professor Klaus Dodds explores the issue with tremendous clarity in his fascinating new book, "Border Wars: The Conflicts that Will Define Our Future."
Joining Robert Amsterdam on this episode of Departures, Prof. Dodds argues that even though we have international legal frameworks such as the Law of the Sea, it has already been demonstrated that some countries pick and choose legal principles as lawfare (such as building islands), we don't always choose to penalize violations, while there is a constant reshaping and reinterpretation of borders making it much more difficult to separate and demarcate sovereign territories with clarity.
Dodds' book provides a fascinating look into the future, where climate change, pandemics, and digital surveillance are all contributing to changes in our physical world that are certain to be the source of challenging conflicts in the years to come.
As world leaders gather in Scotland for the COP26 climate change summit this week, there's a tremendous level of scrutiny not over the ambitions but the shortcomings of the world's biggest sources of emissions.
This week, Departures is pleased to invite David Claydon, the founder of Kaya Group, which is an advisory firm which helps companies, investors, and governments navigate climate change policy and the decarbonization process.
Claydon, who will be among the delegates in Glasgow, is clear-eyed about the stiff challenges facing the major players. Xi Jinping will not be attending, so little progress can be expected from China. Russia shows only a passing interest and little ability to transition away from its fossil fuel economy, while India is not expected to deliver much in the way of promises. US President Joe Biden, meanwhile, arrives with a dearth of trust and credibility, with his reconciliation budget package held up by the Republicans and members of his own party.
Claydon points out that the pandemic has made COP26 all the more challenging.
"There was a lot of hope that the COVID vaccine distribution question would be a great test of solidarity between developed countries and developing countries," says Claydon. "But if it was a test, Western countries have failed it. The lack of distribution of vaccine has been another factor undermining trust between countries."
But we "shouldn't be too pessimistic," Claydon argues. The US may not have the credibility to go to COP26 and issue demands, but that's not what COP26 is all about, it's all about each nation declaring what they intend to achieve and then keeping to that. And President Joe Biden, Claydon says, should be able to muster "just enough" credibility to follow through with the decarbonization goals set out this past Earth Day.
Many of us have wondered what it would be like to be a real spy. Not necessarily the James Bond-esque car chases and shootouts, but the real practice of exercising tradecraft in the field, recruiting and handling assets, and maintaining such a complex web of relationships between your colleagues, family, and sources.
There could possibly be no better book to take us deep into this world than the latest release by Douglas London, titled "The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence."
London, who was a 34-year veteran of the CIA, shares highly personal and courageous details in this memoir, which makes for such a fascinating read.
London takes us from his earlier Cold War days up through 9/11 and the dawn of the war on terror, which saw an unfortunate shift within the intelligence community toward more militaristic covert action and paramilitary operations that undermined traditional espionage. And with this shift, also came a decreasing level of accountability for who is responsible when things go wrong, something London wrestles with clear moral clarity and no excuses for the mismanagement he witnessed.
Along with this memoir comes a series of clear-eyed recommendations that should be taken very seriously to reform and recover the reputation of the clandestine service.
We are no longer living in a unipolar world of US dominance, argues India's brilliant former Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon in the latest episode of Departures with Robert Amsterdam, but neither have we transitioned to multipolarity or whatever is coming next.
Former Ambassador Menon's new book, "India and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present," is slightly misleading in its title, in that it implies a regional study, when in fact his insights, analysis, and proscriptions are truly global in their validity.
In this discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Menon addresses the sweeping changes which have undergone Asia in the past few decades, including the rebalancing between India and China, and makes a strong argument for the enhancement and expansion of Mumbai's integration and engagement with the international system.
Menon expresses his concern over the spread of rising nationalism and nativism in many countries, which he argues often restricts their ability to negotiate and successfully engage with other nations to make progress on the world's most pressing issues.
A truly fascinating discussion with one of the world's most experienced diplomats.
History is not a single continuum. There are certain stretches in which momentous change occurs in a very compact timeframe. The forty-year period between 1490 and 1530 is one of these bursts of revolutionary change. In The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World, Patrick Wyman, a historian and the host of the popular podcast Tides of History, argues that the turn of the 16th century was a momentous moment in history when Europe began to break off from the rest of the world and “became recognizably the global power,” ushering in the era of imperialism and colonialism – “the central problem of world history in the last 500 years.”
Rather than studying the centuries-long process that brought us into the modern era, Wyman looks at a particularly eventful period which began this “Great Divergence.” Europe at the turn of the 16th century featured the invention of the printing press, great sea voyages, the rise of modern finance, extreme taxation, among other revolutionary developments. Of these, Wyman argues, the printing press – which allowed for the creation of mass media – is the single most important of these developments. Indeed, Colombus’ voyages were “a media event as much as they were a historical event. The two aren’t really separable.”
The period of 1490-1530 is especially notable for what Wyman describes as the “scaling effect.” While in the 21st century it seems almost obvious that a revolutionary invention would lead to rapid and massive scaling up. But at the turn of the 16th century, the rapidity of the scaling effect of everything from mass media to sea voyages “scaled in a way that would have been extremely foreign at this time.”
The Verge also tells its story through individuals which Wyman links with a broader theme. Famous figures such as Christopher Colombus and Martin Luther feature, as do lesser-known individuals such as the banker Jakob Fugger and printer Aldus Manutius. Wyman delves into an extraordinarily important period of European history that shaped our globalized present from multiple angles and refreshing nuance.
Since Britain's annexation of Lagos in 1861 up until independence in 1960, the history of colonialism in Nigeria has almost always been told from London's perspective - often exaggerating the benevolent intentions and downplaying and blameshifting the abuses, ethnic violence, and social disarray the occupation created.
Every listener to this podcast knows that we love Nigeria. Been traveling there and working there for decades, so when we heard about Max Siollun's new book, "What Britain Did to Nigeria: A Short History of Conquest and Rule," we had to get him on the podcast.
In his discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Siollun emphasizes just how cynically the British colonial administrators exploited ethnic and religious identity to maintain control of territories, while forcefully rejecting the myth the Nigeria's problems are purely homegrown.
Instead of solely focusing on Nigeria's modern problems of corruption, crime, and terrorism, instead it can be argued that the country, which is by far the most unique nation on earth, like a combination of Iran and Norway in the same territory, is a remarkable success story given the sheer impossible circumstances the colonizers created. Nigerians should be given credit for what they've achieved as a nation, despite the indelible and tragic legacy left behind by colonial rule.
Looking back almost 60 years ago when the United States and the Soviet Union came within an inch of destroying the world via all-out nuclear war, we continue to gain new insights into the dramatic events, the changing of thinking and decision-making that went on in both ExComm and the Presidium.
This week we're proud to be joined Serhii Plokhy, a professor of history at Harvard University and the author of the excellent book, "Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis."
Plokhy's book provides an international perspective on the crisis, featuring unprecedented access to Soviet archives and documentary materials showing how Nikita Khrushchev navigated the incredibly tense diplomatic showdown as well as the struggle for influence going on within the Presidium.
Plokhy's findings reveal that CIA intelligence could have catastrophically misjudged Russia's ability to fight in Cuba and launch warheads, including how they appeared to miss the presence of nine short-range Luna missiles with nuclear warheads, each one only slightly less powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The CIA also greatly underestimated the number of Soviet troops on the island — the actual figure was 40,000, not 4,000. If the United States attacked Cuba, the Soviets were fully prepared to defend it with conventional and nuclear munitions.
In his discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Dr. Plokhy explores the numerous ways in which, with hindsight, the missile crisis was a political and diplomatic victory for the Soviet Union, considering the circumstances, while also giving us insight into just how close the two countries came to war.
As Kennedy and Khrushchev just barely navigated their way out of a world-destroying nuclear armageddon, there remain many lessons to be explored with regard to statecraft, diplomacy, and decisionmaking in a crisis.
The Pulitzer-winning historian joins the Departures podcast this week to discuss his book, "Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis," which not only provides fresh insight into the critical meetings which changed Kennedy's thinking on the proper response, but also explores the deep roots of the crisis, how Washington played with nuclear escalation with a monstrous recklessness.
In his discussion with Amsterdam, Sherwin argues that the disadvantages of nuclear weapons outweigh their advantages, discarding the conventional wisdom that the bombing of Hiroshima was instrumental in Japan's surrender. Sherwin makes it clear that if the Joint Chiefs of Staff had had their way, the US government would have mounted an full-scale armed invasion of Cuba. But luckily, Kennedy discarded the advice of both his brother and Robert McNamara, instead taking guidance from Adlai Stevenson.
The rapid collapse of Kabul in the final weeks of the US withdrawal has forced a reckoning of not only Washington's failure in the region, but broader questions about US foreign policy and what the Biden administration wants (or is actually able) to achieve.
This week Departures with Robert Amsterdam is pleased to welcome a return guest for this special emergency podcast, Prof. Alexander Cooley of Barnard College, who is a highly regarded expert on Central Asian politics and the coauthor of the excellent book, "Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order."
According to Cooley, Biden's mishandling of the Afghanistan withdrawal should be understood in the context of his own history on this area of this world, including his opposition to previous surges, and his insistence that the pullout had to happen now without any extensions, without any further excuses to be further, inextricably drawn into a permanent military presence.
Robert Amsterdam offers the comment that US policymakers have allowed domestic politics to interfere far too much in high-level strategic decision-making, which makes Joe Biden a lot more similar to Donald Trump than many would care to admit.
Cooley also emphasizes just how much the region has changed since the original invasion in 2001, with the development of the SCO structure and the active participation and preparation of foreign interests, including but not limited to both China and Russia.
"Let's face it: China does get a global win out of this," Cooley says. "US prestige, credibility is badly damaged. The overall narrative that the US goes into places, doesn't finish the job, and leaves in its wake collapsed states is strengthened. And it allows them to play a greater proactive role in shaping and redefining the region in the North-South axis."
The chaotic withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and rapid fall of Kabul to the Taliban brought back in sharp focus the misguided policies of the George W. Bush administration that led the US into the War on Terror.
In “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq,” Robert Draper, a writer at large for the New York Times Magazine and the author of several books tells the story of the Bush Administration’s misguided invasion of Iraq in 2003. Draper delves into the relationships between the President, his key advisors, and the US intelligence community while painting a vivid picture of the misguided decision-making process that led to groupthink and a colossal intelligence failure.
The popular narrative on the invasion of Iraq points to the politicization of intelligence on the question of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. Draper’s book delves into this question, revealing in intimate detail the intense pressure piled onto the agency by Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff Lewis Libby.
While Draper tells the story of the invasion of Iraq with remarkable impartiality and fair-mindedness, he also presents an especially unflattering portrayal of CIA Director George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Draper reveals, for instance, that the Defense Secretary was privy to authoritative intelligence in September 2002 – a full seven months before the invasion of Iraq was launched – that it was highly unlikely that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. “Rumsfeld was uniquely in possession of an argument not to go to war, and he sat on it,” Draper concludes.
The United States continues to suffer from the consequences of the decisions made in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Draper’s book should serve as a warning and a guide about the dangers of executive decision making gone wrong and the disastrous consequences that can result.
China’s rise on the global stage has sparked both envy and fear across the globe. Much has been written about how China might reshape the international order, but few have taken the time to delve into the myriad Chinese actors and interests that collectively make up China’s newfound global influence rather than viewing Beijing as a monolith.
Shaun Breslin, Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick analyzes the nature of Chinese power and the extreme – and often contradictory – responses that it has triggered across the globe in his book “China Risen? Studying Chinese Global Power.” The book takes the unique approach of delving into the complex Chinese-language debates and discussions surrounding the nature and aims of Chinese power in the 21st century to form a more comprehensive picture of what China actually wants on the global stage.
Breslin highlights the contradictory analyses of China’s rise, noting that “You can end up with two very different conversations about China almost on the same day. One is the impending collapse of China and doom and gloom, and almost at the same time China’s impending rise to global superpower status.”
Breslin also considers how perceptions of China have rapidly shifted in recent years, noting that until 2016, much of the West (minus the United States, which has long harbored suspicions of Beijing’s rise) was relatively acquiescent before taking a much harder line in the past few years.
In "Don't Call it a Cult," Vancouver-based investigative journalist Sarah Berman tells the story of the bizarre cult known as NXIVM. Founded by longtime pyramid scheme mastermind Keith Raniere in 1998 who referred to himself in the group as the "Vanguard," the group roped in many rich and prominent individuals from socialities Buffy and William Cafritz, actress Nicki Clyne, and Clare Bronfman, heir to the Seagram fortune who enabled and funded the cult.
Raniere was sentenced last year to 120 years in prison for sex trafficking, racketeering, and forced labor and Berman's book tells the story of the group through Raniere's trial. Many of the women in NXIVM found themselves blackmailed and literally branded with Raniere's initials on their bodies, near-starved, and enslaved. Raniere built a wall of silence and went after enemies and whistleblowers until the very end, and convinced his members that they had joined an "executive coaching" group rather than a dangerous and exploitative cult.
Raniere does not just tell the story of NXIVM. She seeks to define what a cult is beyond the colloquial understanding of the term, and focuses on "trying to separate what this concept that we have of what a cult is, and what the actual harms are."
Berman also tells the story of NXIVM from the perspective of members on the inside, and how such horrific abuses were initially seen as mentorship and protection. It is a highly readable investigative work that explores the vexxing topic of how such an organization was able to avoid prosecution for decades and should serve as essential reading to anyone interested in cults and how they come to be.
By many measures, 2020 was a year to forget. With natural disasters, a climate crisis, a vicious pandemic, a massive economic crisis, a cruel and dishonest president, unprecedented demands for racial justice and its corresponding ugly backlash, US society has been taken to the brink.
For Prof. Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, these events represent an American Apocalypse, one which requires a thorough rethinking of how Washington engages with the wider world based on the needs of its people and the very different circumstances we face now as compared to the postwar period.
Bacevich's book, "After the Apocalypse: America's Role in a World Transformed" argues that American foreign policy has in many ways failed to protect the safety of its people. The insistence on global military primacy and spreading market economy has not delivered a stable world order, but instead has brought endless wars and a succession of moral and material disasters.
In his discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Bacevich outlines his theory on US alliances, why we should be drawing down military forces in Europe and the Middle East, and why we should have a greater focus on solving the hardest problems at home and strengthening relations with our immediate neighbors.
As the US navigates these struggles over racial injustice for example, Bacevich argues, there is an opportunity to reshape our understanding of the past, and thereby reshape our understanding of our role in the world.
In the Xinjiang region of northwestern China, more than 1.8 million people have been disappeared into a vast network of concentration camps without any clear charges, due process, or fair trial. How are these victims selected? Via state-of-the-art predictive artificial intelligence and surveillance technology systems deployed by Beijing that seek to punish people for political activity they may be profiled to potentially commit in the future.
This week on the podcast we're very pleased to feature journalist and author Geoffrey Cain, discussing his excellent new book, "The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future."
Cain's deep dive into the issues surrounding Xinjiang explores how the hardening of Xi Jinping's positions and adversarial tilt toward foreign powers has influenced this implementation of Big Tech in the service of crushing dissent among Uighur Chinese citizens.
The book tells this fascinating story through the eyes of three subjects who survived the "panopticon" and escaped abroad, obtaining impressive government and corporate sources to explain the extent of the police state's technological power and its resulting impact of creating a pervasive culture of fear and paranoia in this region and beyond.
Quite a terrifying read, but also an urgently important wake-up call.
In power since 2005, Angela Merkel's CDU coalition has managed to govern Germany with an admirable level of success, but at the same time during this period, Vladimir Putin's Russia has invaded multiple countries, interfered in elections both near and far away, and run amok with jailings and assassinations of dissidents. How is it possible that still today, many German public officials fail to see that they have a problem in managing relations with Moscow?
Author John Lough, a friend of the podcast and an Associate Fellow at Chatham House's Russia and Eurasia Programme, tackles this thorny issue in his latest book, "Germany's Russia Problem: The Struggle for Balance in Europe."
Lough explores the uniquely close historical ties between Russia and Germany, including some practices and perceptions dating back to the GDR, as well as Vladimir Putin's training in East Berlin to communicate with and influence prominent German political leaders. Lough argues that Moscow's attempts to rebalance Europe by weakening the European Union and NATO are a direct threat to Germany's national interests, but until recently, there has been little policy developed to respond and contain Moscow.
When we think about dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, we tend to think of extremes. Places like North Korea, with brutal, absolutist rulers vanquishing their opponents with prejudice and limitless power.
But that's really not the reality for most autocratic countries, in fact, there are usually a series of executive constraints, rules, procedures, and structures even in the most non-democratic countries which shape and limit what the leader can do, and how stable transitions of power take place.
That's the focus of attention in Anne Meng's terrific new book, "Constraining Dictatorship: From Personalized Rule to Institutionalized Regimes," in which she sets out to study these institutions, exploring how these rules get created in dictatorships, and how key appointments are made.
Meng argues that the first couple of years in a given autocratic regime are instrumental in the creation of executive constraints, especially when weaker leaders come into power and find themselves creating "institutional promises" to maintain intra-elite support.
In particular, Meng and Robert Amsterdam discuss the case of Paul Biya in Cameroon and how he has sought to unwind many institutional constraints as well as how he has attempted to appoint weak elite successors to ensure he is not overthrown.
To commemorate the 100th episode of our Departures with Robert Amsterdam podcast, for the first time we have invited back a return guest, one of our favorite authors, Philip Zelikow.
Dr. Zelikow is a renowned former diplomat, historian, lawyer academic, and author of extraordinary talent. He has formerly served as the Director of the 9/11 Commission, the former Counsel to State Department, National Security Council, and currently serves as the director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia.
In his latest book, "The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917," Zelikow examines the pivotal period of time when World War I could have ended - right before that fragile peace was squandered.
Zelikow's book unpacks and demystifies a period of failed diplomacy during the great war, and shows how the machinery of engagement works while providing a much more nuanced presentation and appreciation for the operational craft of peacemaking.
Speaking in the podcast with Robert Amsterdam, Zelikow reflects on the disastrous role of American diplomat Edward Mandell House. "Was he a fool or a villain? I would say probably a little bit of both," Zelikow says. "If enough people read this book, they may need to post guards around Edward House's grave to prevent it from being vandalized."
The disruptive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has obliterated many standing global norms, but it's less clear how this crisis could change our approach to solving the world's biggest challenges.
According to Ian Goldin, who is a Professor of Globalisation and Development at the University of Oxford, the coronavirus pandemic could serve as the necessary catalyst to set in motion a much stronger response to a vast array of challenges, from climate change to inequality to conflicts.
With the pandemic, Goldin argues, the entire world is sharing the same experience at the same time for the first time. After going through the crisis together, many people finally understood the essential role of government in their lives. Governments understood that many taboo policies, such as direct relief payments to citizens, banning bankruptcies and evictions, were now possible.
By focusing on reducing the number of participants to a solution, instead of just kicking problems up to the UN level where nothing happens, there are pathways to solving or at least making progress on many major issues of the day - we just have to decide that we want to, argues Goldin.
This July, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated its 100th anniversary, marking a major milestone and underlining some major questions about its future.
No other communist party has lasted this long, and certainly no other ruling authoritarian government has held its grip on power for a similar period of time in the modern era. But that's not to there was ever inertia. The party's history has been fraught with difficult decisions, successes, mistakes, and sweeping changes of perspective, ideology, and strategic engagement in the global environment.
To mark this important anniversary, Robert Amsterdam is joined by Hans van de Ven and Philip Bowring, who along with others respectively edited and contributed to the excellent new book, "The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in Ten Lives."
The book takes a novel approach to presenting this complex history, with each author presenting the story of a single individual for each decade, bringing engaging and colorful personal histories to reflect on the Party's relentless pursuit of power and extraordinary adaptability through the transformative decades since 1921.
There is little debate over the fact that Russia is an authoritarian state in Vladimir Putin's grip, one which oppresses the rights of its citizens and suppresses the voice of the political opposition. But this does not mean that elections and the democratic process - weakened as it may be - is not still important in terms of applying pressure on the Russian government and constraining and shaping its choices.
In her fascinating new book, "Elections, Protest, and Authoritarian Regime Stability: Russia 2008–2020," Prof. Regina Smyth of the University of Indiana explores these questions, closely studying a decade of elections to determine how much electoral competition matters to the Putin regime and how competition leaves Russia more vulnerable to opposition challenges than is perceived in the West.
"When there is so much manipulation of elections, elections aren't about winners and losers per se, they are about the information or what you learn from the electoral process," Smyth argues. "Do you learn that the state is strong, or do you learn that the state is afraid of its people and its voters? Do you learn that the opposition can unify, or do you learn that it is simply fragmented?"
Smyth dedicates some terrific research into the regime's response to the rise of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and what those responses mean in terms of the stability of Putin's administration.
Vladimir Putin never seems to go away. No matter what economic or political crisis, invasions of neighboring nations, or crushing oppression of basic civil liberties, he somehow manages to sustain enough of a perception of popular support and legitimacy to keep on going. Why?
That's the question studied in the terrific new book "The Red Mirror: Putin's Leadership and Russia's Insecure Identity" by Gulnaz Sharafutdinova. Taking a social identity theory approach to the puzzle of Putin's popularity, Sharafutdinova argues that he was able to successfully mobilize a collective identity, that "he secured Russia's insecure identity."
The Kremlin captured upon the idea of the juxtaposition between the Putin era of Russia and the chaotic 1990s, Sharafutdinova argues, and was able to build a coherent community of support around that idea, in addition to their revival of many pillars of social identity used in the past by the Soviet Union.
In her discussion with Robert Amsterdam, the author discusses the idea that this idea of "homo sovieticus" has actually been globalized, that we can find collective identity groups created by political leaders (Trump, for example), where a sense of shared victimhood is expressed and a desire to resist against an enemy is articulated through their political support of a candidate.
When we understand how popular support for Putin's regime is sustained and upheld despite obvious setbacks and costs, we can become much smarter about which policies are going to be more successful in dealing with Russia and managing some of the biggest problems that come from its conduct in the international space.
Since Xi Jingping rose to power in 2012, China has embarked on a new phase of expanding their role as a global superpower. Gone are the days of the charm offensive and the peaceful rise, here come the 'wolf warriors.' Xi's "Chinese Dream" has been pitched by state propaganda as a visionary plan for a "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" leading up to the year 2049, but now it seems they are entering a phase where the internal threats significantly outweigh the external challenges to realizing this dream.
Prof. Jing Sun of the University of Denver, who formerly worked as a correspondent for Chinese state media, joins Departures with Robert Amsterdam this week to discuss his fascinating new book, "Red Chamber, World Dream: Actors, Audience, and Agendas in Chinese Foreign Policy and Beyond."
Sun argues that the development and implementation of major Chinese foreign policy decisions are hardly unilateral dictates from the party leadership. Instead, there are a multitude of actors and sources of pressure from society playing out in intraparty fighting, inter-ministerial feuding, social media, TV dramas and movies, among others. Understanding how these forces work and interact can do much to advance our understanding of how China reaches its foreign policy outcomes - decisions which of course have major impacts on the global system writ large.
In the 13th and 14th centuries, the Mongol horde exercised control over an unfathomably large empire, spanning thousands of miles from Europe to Russia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. History has often not looked kindly upon these nomadic civilizations, which has led to some major blindspots regarding astonishing achievements, explosive growth in trade, commerce, and communications, and even a certain level of resilience and tolerance of governing very different and often opposing groups.
Prof. Marie Favereau joins the Departures with Robert Amsterdam podcast this week to discuss her fascinating new book, "The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World." As Favereau argues in her book, the Mongol empire had its own unique political regime, including a complex power-sharing arrangement among the khan and the nobility which rewarded the best administrators and diplomats and fostered an economic order that was mobile, organized, and innovative. The success of this empire provided a early governance model for Russia, influenced social practice and state structure across Islamic cultures, and disseminated a sophisticated knowledge of nature across vast territories.
This enjoyable conversation with Favereau will make you rethink past assumptions about the Mongol empire, and better understand how it influenced the world which followed.
This week we are beyond thrilled to have Mahmood Mamdani on the podcast, one of the world's most highly regarded public intellectuals, author of dozens of books, and a decorated professor at Columbia University. Dr. Mamdani has had diverse life experience, from marching on Birmingham for civil rights to being chased from Kampala by the Idi Amin regime to fighting apartheid in South Africa, and in his new book, "Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities," he explores the decolonization of justice and the separation between national identity and culture and state power.
As competition in the field of cyberwarfare heats up between Russia and the United States, there are few other experts with more experience working inside the Central Intelligence Agency than Jack Devine.
For 32 years Devine worked as a US spymaster, serving as Acting Director and Associate Director of CIA’s operations outside the United States from 1993-1995, where he had supervisory authority over thousands of CIA employees involved in sensitive missions throughout the world. In addition, he served as Chief of the Latin American Division from 1992-1993 and was the principal manager of the CIA’s sensitive projects in Latin America.
Devine's new book, "Spymaster’s Prism: The Fight Against Russian Aggression," explores a number of major espionage incidents which have taken place between the two nations since the end of World War II, and what lessons can be drawn to prepare for the next phase of competition in the clandestine services.
The inside anecdotes alone make this book an exciting read, and Devine presents his highly unique perspective with detail and fascinating historical context from his own personal involvement in the service.
When a government wants to break into someone's iPhone or Android device, there's a marketplace where that kind of vulnerability hacking service is bought and sold - costing sometimes as much as $2.5 million.
The very fact that such a marketplace exists for cyberwarfare is an illustration of the rapidly growing field of threats we face, and also a sign of how dramatically unprepared we are to defend against these attacks. From the SolarWinds hack in 2020 which was one of the largest breaches of sensitive government data to the more recent attacks on small municipal water plants, utilities, and pipelines, there is an expanding intensity of the sophistication of cyber weapons and the United States is rapidly falling way behind the curve.
Nicole Perlroth, the award-winning New York Times journalist, joins the podcast to discuss her excellent book, "This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race," a stunning work of investigative journalism spanning seven years of detailed research and interviews.
According to Perlroth, the United States has an extremely soft underbelly of connected infrastructure which has profound exposures and no system of defense. Meanwhile, Russia is conducting targeted testing of its cyberwarfare tools all over the world, preparing for a future event. The NSA can perfect its offensive cyber-weaponry all it wants, she says, but currently there is still very little planning to prepare for the coming war.
Whether or not the United States will respond in time to these threats and develop defenses is going to have a major impact on our future security.
Imagine you are trapped in a far-flung foreign compound with 10 other people, none of them want to be there, but you have a seemingly limitless supply of alcohol. Oh, and you are charged with developing critical intelligence and knowledge for Imperial Russia's ambitions to gain global power.
That's among the many fascinating stories in Gregory Afinogenov's new book, "Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power," which explores how knowledge about Asia was developed from the 17th to the 19th centuries.
What's interesting about this unique period of history that Afinogenov writes about is how espionage was used as a means of generating knowledge for public intellectuals, helping Imperial Russia to compete with rival Britain, to advance a deeper knowledge of the East - but this information, filtered and passed through Moscow, rarely met its goal and often did not get distributed inside Russia itself, shaping future relations with China in various ways.
Afinogenov argues that we should take a critical look at the assumptions that connect knowledge regimes with imperial power, and how this neglected intellectual history offers insight and value to historians.
For decades, academics and journalists have struggled to explain Russia by attempting to better explain Vladimir Putin, endlessly debating his background, his personal character, and his thinking. Many of them argue that his personal power is at the heart of decision-making, that his will alone drives events. And we couldn't be more wrong.
Timothy Frye, a professor of political science at Columbia University, has had decades of experience working on the ground in Russia, and brings together these anecdotes of his experiences along with academic research to present a new argument: that's there's nothing particularly special about Vladimir Putin to set him apart from numerous other authoritarian leaders. His power is in fact quite constrained, consisting of a complex series of trade-offs and difficult decisions made more challenging by his low popularity and the responsiveness of the government to public pressure.
Speaking about his new book "Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia" in this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Frye offers a fresh perspective on the traditional debates over Russia, emphasizing that we should understand the system and how it works instead of the individual.
From the first election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1998 to the death of Fidel Castro in Cuba in 2016, Latin America experienced a vast "pink tide" of left-leaning leaders often described as populist.
And while it would be a mistake to consider all these diverse personalities and governments under a single banner, it would also be a mistake to ignore some similar systemic undercurrents and driving factors behind this period of populism in Latin America, argues Will Grant, a BBC reporter and author of the new book "Populista: The Rise of Latin America's 21st Century Strongman."
Speaking in this interview with Robert Amsterdam, Grant explores how populism became the most important political movement in the Western Hemisphere in the 21st century, and then how that idealism came crashing down, leaving Latin America in the grips of some of the most authoritarian and dangerous leaders since the military dictatorships of the 1970s.
In light of the escalating violence taking place in Israel this week, we reached out to our friend and colleague Ron Robin, a scholar, author, and the President of Haifa University.
In this brief interview, which was interrupted at several points by air raid sirens nearby Prof. Robin's location, we discuss the origins of the political violence we are seeing, the end of Benjamin Netanyahu's political career, and the potential impact of the Abraham Accords and other diplomatic forces - including Russia - which may provide for the resolution and management of tensions in Gaza.
Near the end of this episode, host of the Departures podcast Robert Amsterdam tells his guest, "This is perhaps the best book I've ever read on Africa, and I've read a lot of books."
Such is the esteem we hold for Michela Wrong, a British journalist who has covered Africa for decades for outlets such as the BBC and the Financial Times. Her latest book, "Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad," tells the inside story of the authoritarian regime of President Paul Kagame in Rwanda through the lens of one specific murder case - the 2013 killing of Patrick Karegeya, the former head of external intelligence, and extrapolating that investigation to reveal so much more about the country and the region.
Wrong's book also serves as a sledgehammer to a number of myths that tend to be held up about Rwanda - not just the enormous chasm between its darling status among donor organizations and its reality as an apartheid state, but also crucial facts about Hutu victims of the genocide, the shooting down of the 1994 flight carrying the then-presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, and the "potemkin village" aspect of Rwanda's economic transformation.
In April 2013, in a distant corner of Nigeria, a terrorist group kidnapped some 300 schoolgirls, eventually igniting a global advocacy campaign that brought an unprecedented level of international attention to the country. This global attention, which involved interventions by Western intelligence agencies, military advisors, and a plethora of aid NGOs, has not necessarily always resulted in success.
The Wall Street Journal reporter Drew Hinshaw, along with his co-author Joe Parkinson, has published a fascinating deep dive into this incident under the title "Bring Back Our Girls: The Untold Story of the Global Search for Nigeria's Missing Schoolgirls."
Hinshaw and Parkinson write that the kidnapping of Chibok girls represented "not just a story about a remote tragedy-stricken town in Nigeria, but a parable and perhaps a cautionary tale about the flawed interconnected workings of our butterfly’s-wings world."
In recent years, China has gradually transitioned from a "quiet rise" strategy under Hu Jintao to the "wolf warrior" mode of diplomacy, as the government seeks to take more aggressive actions to defend its interests and expand its influence in the international environment. While this has in many cases produced successful outcomes, there is also a growing body of evidence that Beijing is running into resistance.
Luke Patey, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and Lead Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, joins Robert Amsterdam on this podcast to discuss his fascinating new book, "How China Loses: The Pushback against Chinese Global Ambitions," which focuses on these issues.
According to Patey, China has shown a determined strategy to use initiatives such as Belt and Road and Made in China 2025 to achieve dominance in high-tech industries and advanced manufacturing. Many fear that China's economic clout, tech innovations, and military power will allow it to remake the world in its own authoritarian image. But despite all these strengths, a future with China in charge is far from certain, Patey argues.
There are increasing examples of this strategy failing - and not just because there is any sort of coherent resistance from Washington. China's predatory economic agenda, headstrong diplomacy, and military expansion often undermine its global ambitions to dominate the global economy and world affairs. In Patey's book, he interviews activists, business managers, diplomats, and thinkers from Africa to Latin America who have been found themselves turned off by Beijing's charm offensive, revealing the challenges threatening to ground China's rising power.
Since the end of the Cold War, Turkey's geostrategic relevance as a NATO ally bridging the West with Asia has been highlighted repeatedly - but there's often been less attention on how Ankara's role has been managed in terms of its relations with Beijing.
This week Selçuk Çolakoğlu of the Turkish Center for Asia Pacific Studies joins Robert Amsterdam to discuss his new book, "Turkey And China: Political, Economic, And Strategic Aspects Of The Relationship."
This detailed and informative study covers numerous aspects of the relationship, ranging from Sino-Turkish cooperation on energy, trade, and security, but also issues such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the roles of other actors -- particularly the United States and Russia.
From the earliest days of representative government, special advisers have served an essential background role in politics, never more so than in the last 50 years in Great Britain. They have performed tasks both administrative and policy-oriented, mundane and extraordinary, and have affected domestic and even foreign policy matters, in both seen and unforeseen ways.
In his new book, "The Secret Life of Special Advisers," Peter Cardwell unravels the decades of mystique surrounding those whom Piers Morgan has called “these miserable little creatures,” key advisers to Cabinet ministers and the British Prime Minster since the 1970s. Featuring personal anecdotes and incredible stories from his days as a special advisor to four UK cabinet ministers within the Cameron, May and early Johnson administrations.
During this podcast discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Mr. Cardwell highlights the importance of a united party, where divisions and excessive amounts of rivalry within a political party can lead to chaotic outcomes on the national scale. He also touches on the factors that led to Brexit such as widespread mistrust in the government as well as the conflicting loyalties held by ministers involved in Britain’s final decision to leave the European Union.
From the ministers themselves to their advisers to the voters who democratically elected them, ultimately it is a choice to get involved in public life as much as it is a calling. “Politics is often made up of many, many volunteers,” declares Mr. Cardwell at the end of the podcast, and he’s right.
There are few turncoat spies more infamous than George Blake, an MI6 agent who spied for the Soviet Union in the 1950s, was later caught, convicted and sentenced to 42 years in prison. There are even fewer to manage to escape prison and flee to the East to live a life of relative happiness and satisfaction.
This story is masterfully told in the new book, "The Happy Traitor: Spies, Lies and Exile in Russia: The Extraordinary Story of George Blake," authored by the Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper.
Simon joined the Departures podcast for a discussion with Robert Amsterdam about Blake's fascinating life, his dramatic escape as a prisoner of war in North Korea and also his escape from prison in Britain.
With unprecedented access to Blake including the last major extended interview he gave, Kuper's book is an exploration of the life of one of the more fascinating character's in Cold War history, how he came to reach the momentous decisions in his career and how he managed to never look back with any sort of regret for the path he chose.
Generally in the scholarship on Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey's most famous transformative leader, there are only a handful of books which delve into the making of the politics and the culture in the lead-up to him becoming president in 1923.
In his new book, "Eternal Dawn: Turkey in the Age of Atatürk," Prof. Ryan Gingeras of the Naval Postgraduate School aims to cover that gap, providing a kaleidoscopic view of the sweeping changes in society that were taking place during his time in power and what they mean for Turkey's evolution as a country.
Eternal Dawn presses beyond the reigning mythology that still envelops this period and challenges many of the standing assumptions about the limits, successes, and consequences of the reforms that comprised Mustafa Kemal's revolution. Through a detailed survey of social and political conditions that defined life in the capital as well as Turkey's diverse provinces, Gingeras lays bare many of the harsh realities and bitter legacies incurred as a result of the republic's establishment and transformation.
What a nightmare for Vladimir Putin.
When Russian-backed militants shot down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in Ukraine in 2014, killing almost 300 innocent people, the Kremlin defaulted to its usual muscular disinformation tactics and media operations to confuse and cloud the issue. But who stepped forward to bring accountability and facts, they didn't see it coming.
Eliot Higgins is the founder of the open source intelligence intelligence (OSINT) collective known as Bellingcat. His group, with the contributions of hundreds of volunteers, was able to track down and verify videos and cell phone data, Google Earth satellite images, and other sources to verify, confirm, and indict Russia for its responsibility in this heinous act. From there, they have moved onto conflicts and crises worldwide, providing intelligence in a popularized, non-government manner.
Higgins' latest book, "We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People," tells the story his organization's rise, and what OSINT means for the future of democracy, conflicts, and humanitarian crises when increasingly the duty falls to citizens, not government agencies, to critically examine information and provide the factual accounts necessary for accountability.
When former President Donald Trump ordered the drone strike which claimed the life of General Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran's elite Quds Force, it irrecoverably changed the future path of the country and region at large.
This week we are proud to have a special guest, the Iranian historian and NYU professor Arash Azizi to discuss his new book, "The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US, and Iran's Global Ambitions," which provides a riveting account of the life of one of the most influential figures in modern Middle Eastern history.
According to Azizi, had Soleimani not been killed in that drone strike, it would be very likely that he would emerge as the next presidential candidate - a role that his daughter is now appearing to fulfill.
The military career of Soleimani was outstanding in several respects, but notably for the level of hubris he displayed which was uncommon among Iran's military leadership.
"He published Game of Thrones-themed memes against Donald Trump prepared by his team on Twitter, he threatened Pakistan with a military incursion over some issues, and even threatened the Sunni king of Bahrain with a coup," Azizi says. "These were things that the top military commanders in Iran had never done, they had learned to be more diplomatic. But that's the level of confidence and hubris that Soleimani displayed."
Often overlooked, the nations of Central Asia represent a highly important geostrategic region of the world with abundant mineral and energy wealth - and yet, US diplomatic efforts in these countries are way behind the larger neighbors of Russia and China.
Part of this lack of engagement has to do with how America - at least as a symbol - is understood and regarded by various social groups.
Professor Edward Schatz of the University of Toronto joins the Departures podcast this week to discuss his excellent book, "Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements and Symbolic Politics in Central Asia" which explores these topics through an innovative lens.
The book features an exploration of how Islamist movements, human rights activists, and labor mobilizers across Central Asia receive and process information about what America is and what its values are, which is often strikingly different that the rhetoric of "high politics" like presidential elections and foreign policies.
"The running metaphor that I use in the book is geological - how sediment flows from one place to another," Schatz explains, pointing to how perceptions of anti-Americanism spread in Central Asia. "You can see how sediment builds up in certain places and not in others and what the impact might be, but it's hard to predict in advance."
Whereas many social groups in Central Asia first were informed about the symbol of America through Soviet propaganda, there have been other sources of information, such as slower-moving, partially occluded, and socially embedded processes that ground how "America" becomes political.
At some point, people stopped believing that electing the right leaders and passing the right laws was the most effective way to achieve social change. Since at least the 1970s, people have been rapidly losing faith in government, democracy, big banks, big corporations, organized religion, and other institutions which were thought to help give order and shape norms for society.
In Ethan Zuckerman's new book, "Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them," these questions are explored in great depth while also seeking to illuminate the available solutions for citizens to regain their social capital.
There are four ways that we regulate our societies, Zuckerman says in the podcast interview. We make laws, which say you can't do this or that. We use markets to make bad behavior expensive, like taxing cigarettes. We use social norms - if you engage in prohibited conduct, we will shun you. And lastly, we have code, we use technology to impose normative values, making it more difficult to do bad things.
"What I try to do in Mistrust is turn that inside out," Zuckerman says. "And I basically say each of those four regulatory levers, each of those ways we regulate society, those are tools for social change."
It may be hard for many of our listeners to believe, but once upon a time US foreign policy could offer glimmers of astonishing humanitarianism, which was the case over the epic career of Robert (Bob) Gersony.
While other literary references have framed the actors leading US foreign interventions as "quiet" or "ugly," Gersony's life story offers a vision of the "good American," and a reminder of the importance and strategic value of making decisions based on human rights and protecting refugees.
Veteran journalist and author Robert Kaplan joins the podcast to discuss his latest innovative work, "The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government's Greatest Humanitarian," a story of a foregone time in world history, of the last vestiges of the print and typewriter age where the United States was the foremost world power.
In the mid 20th century, the State Department wasn't yet strictly stocked with Ivy League graduates, but instead included men like Robert Gersony, who’d never held a formal government position or even graduated high school but rose through the highest ranks by means of their character and acumen - a feat which would seem impossible today.
In the podcast, Kaplan describes his work as, “A book of discovery, of how one individual can make a great difference in the world, of rediscovering the American brand” while at the same time rediscovering the world in its full complexities and nuance.
Since the United States touched base in the Philippines in 1898, the relationship between the Philippines and the U.S. has endured with war and military service forging a continuing but contentious relationship between the two countries. But has it been a productive relationship for both members?
While Filipinos have served in the American military since the early 20th century, they were prevented from receiving equitable benefits for their service during World War II until 2009. Historically speaking, they were employed as porters and servers, soldiers and sailors, and their role in the U.S. armed forces simultaneously combated and perpetuated racism and hierarchies within and out of the institution of the military.
During World War II, as Japanese occupation of the Philippines became more violent, the relationship between the US and the Philippines solidified despite the fact that many Filipinos had strongly preferred to ally with Japan.
MIT history professor Christopher Capozzola joins the podcast to discuss his latest work, Bound by War: How the United States and the Philippines Built America's First Pacific Century, which investigates the forgotten alliance between Americans and Filipinos in war and in peace.
From the Philippine–American War at the turn of the 20th century to the post-9/11 conflicts in the Middle East, the two countries have been strategic partners in the consolidation and maintenance of influence over the Pacific region. Following the alliance-breaking debacle of the US war in Iraq, Capozzola was inspired to dive into the tenuous but seemingly unbreaking relationship between the US and the Philippines, its dynamics, its history, and the seemingly unique features which have allowed it to endure.
It is easy to get very comfortable with our surface-level understanding of history. Most of the time it is generally consistent with the facts, except when it isn't.
When it comes to how we regard the notorious regime of Josef Stalin and this particular period of Russian history, there are more than a few areas which have been analyzed and considered completely outside the context of the time in an ahistorical manner. This kind of thinking not only leads to rather annoying comparisons of Stalin with people like Vladimir Putin, but also deprives us of a fulsome understanding of events, motivations, and decisionmaking by the people involved.
James Ryan and Susan Grant join the podcast to discuss their excellent co-edited volume, "Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions, and Controversies," which is a collection of articles examining the controversies of Stalin's leadership and questions regarding the cult of personality surrounding him.
"The past must be understood historically," says Ryan in the interview. "Somebody like Stalin, the Stalinist regime more generally, must be understood historically in its context in its development. And that applies as well to the president today, so these comparisons between Stalinism and Putinism are ahistorical not least because of ideology."
In every important decision in our lives and in our careers, we are presented with a vast array of information. The ways in which we process, analyze, and rationally make decisions not only reflects what every decisionmaker wishes to see, but also the relative weight of how we expect to achieve realistic outcomes - and often times we miscalculate and make mistakes.
This week we are proud to have on the podcast Sir David Omand, a former director of the British intelligence agency GCHQ, whose new book, "How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence," presents a masterclass in critical thinking.
Drawing key experiences from his distinguished career, including key briefings with Prime Ministers from Thatcher to Blair, and conflicts from the Falklands to Afghanistan, Omand shares his strategies to help people to sort fact from fiction and how to use real intelligence for everyday business decisions.
"Data is dumb, correlation is not causation. That's why explanation is everything," says Omand. "Although we never have complete information, if the basic data on which you're trying to base your argument is itself flawed, then you're in real trouble. So teaching people to assess the information they have and weigh it and see whether or not it's sufficiently reliable is key."
The explosion of information in the digital age, with social media offering adversaries channels of information that intersect and overlap with those of ordinary citizens, the work of intelligence agencies is more complex than ever, Omand explains. The work of surveillance isn't just collecting fragments of information of varying levels of quality. The real achievement is the analysis and processing of that information in order to build a full picture - which is a critical thinking approach for the wider world to adopt as well.
Zephyr Teachout is a renowned US law professor, activist, author, and columnist with an expertise in anti-corruption, but we couldn't help but begin our conversation during this podcast to respond to the shocking events in Washington DC on the 6th of January 2021, when a mob of violent rioters forced their way into Congress. With four people dead, three bombs found, the nation may never be the same. So what happens next? What will the consequences be?
"There seems to be a desire to just rush ahead two weeks and to sort of treat this as if we can just sweep it under the rug," Teachout says, but this would be a major mistake. "Trump, Hawley, and Cruz didn't necessarily expect to win, but were playing to social media and really achieved a lot of what they desired because there was no real plan of maintaining control, but there was a plan of really inciting a deep distrust of the peaceful transfer of power. I think of this as a very significant assault on constitutional democracy."
Teachout continues: "Even with just two weeks left, it is important that there be immediate consequences. And I wish that the House was moving forward with Articles of Impeachment, and then separately the House and Senate looking at removal of members who were actively undermining the peaceful transfer of power.".
Amsterdam and Teachout also discuss her brilliant new book, "Break 'Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money," which presents an impassioned critique of the various corporate monopolies which have taken over American life and distorted our economy and politics.
"The essence of the book is to say that we are facing a democratic threat," she says. "They are threatening our media infrastructure, our legal infrastructure, and our political infrastructure by taking over political parties - and then also directly governing."
The situation is not hopeless, however. Teachout argues that there are many tools available at our disposal to recover our freedom and protect democracy from corporate influence - and that begins with antitrust and anticorruption laws that address the power structures instead of just individual criminal liability.
For much of China's history, the Communist Party leadership sought to portray the country's experience in World War II as that of a victim of Japan. But now, as China grows much more powerful and influential, the historical memory is also adapting to tell a different story.
This week we are joined by Rana Mitter, a professor of history at Oxford University, who is the author of "China's Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism."
Mitter's book argues that China’s reassessment of the World War II years is central to its newfound confidence abroad and to mounting nationalism at home. These arguments, which include the promotion of China's role in creating the postwar global order, are reinforced by stronger efforts of public memory of the war, including museums, movies and television shows, street art, popular writing, and social media. Through these lens, "Wartime China" emerges as victor rather than victim.
This reinterpretation of history has both positive and negative impacts on China's ability to conduct diplomacy under growing nationalism.
The United States is a country that spent most of its history avoiding interventions, avoiding entanglement in great power politics, content to be isolated looking after their own affairs. Then suddenly, in just the past 75 years, it has become the world's preeminent armed power in a position of global leadership. How did such a dramatic remaking of America's role take place so quickly?
Historian Stephen Wertheim explores this question and more in his fascinating new book, "Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy," examining the months leading up to Washington's decision to enter the conflict and the impact this decision had on reshaping the nature of the international system leading up to today.
"For most of America's history, the United States did not seek and did not tell itself it was seeking military dominance across the globe," Wertheim says. "Having military dominance, stationing bases around the world, being responsible in principle for enforcing world order - that was not what the United States was doing from its founding to 1940. And so a choice had to be made to put the United States on a fundamentally different path. And it was made, I argue, in the 18 months between the fall of France in the middle of 1940 and the bombing of Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941."
Wertheim continues by breaking down the misapprehension regarding the tug of war between "isolationists" vs. "internationalists," which didn't actually take place, and instead obscures this sea change in the desire for US global leadership. Instead, American leadership was carefully weighing whether it would be possible to preserve a limited Western hemisphere trade bloc while giving up the rest of the world to the Axis powers, and then eventually expanding these areas wider and wider that they considered should be defending for US interests.
Over the past several years, Turkey's relations with both the European Union and the United States have come under strain by factors both internal and external. The complexities of these relationships, in addition to the management of tensions with Russia and the Middle East on numerous fronts are not often clearly understood, even by well informed observers.
This week we have the unique opportunity to hear an insider's perspective from the highly respected former diplomat and senior statesman Onur Öymen, whose numerous diplomatic postings included Ambassador to Denmark, Ambassador to Germany, Permanent Representative to NATO, and Under Secretary of State for National Security.
Dr. Öymen is the author of the new book, "Political Memoirs: Resisting Pressure," which was recently released in Turkish, English translation pending in the future.
Following the World War I breakup of the Ottoman Empire, Prince Faisal came into Damascus to declare his determination to build a constitutional democracy which would serve as the primary building block of a new sovereign state with guaranteed rights for a pluralistic population. Secular modernizers and Islamic reformers created groundbreaking new alliances which could have served as governance models across the Middle East.
But instead, Syrian democracy appeared to be too threatening to British and French colonial interests in the region. The two Western powers refused to recognize the Damascus government and instead imposed a system of mandates on the pretext that Arabs were not yet ready for self-government. In July 1920, the French invaded and crushed the Syrian state.
The story of this period is told in exquisite narrative detail and deeply researched insights by Dr. Elizabeth Thompson, a professor of history at American University and the author of the new book, "How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Syrian Arab Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of its Historic Liberal-Islamic Alliance."
In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Dr. Thompson speaks about the unknown twists and turns of King Faisal's rise to power and rapid downfall, and why we continue to see the ramifications of this anti-democratic intervention by the West that is often ignored in many retellings of the Arab world's experience with democracy and state building.
A favorite historical hypothetical question we often hear tossed around is what should the world have done differently to halt the rise of Nazi Germany and prevent World War II from taking place. But the truth is, the number of signals and signs of this approaching threat were numerous and often rather clear, and so were the opportunities to take action. But instead, Western liberal democracies hesitated and blinked.
Paul Jankowski, a Professor of History at Brandeis University and the author of the excellent book, "All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and the Origins of the Second World War," believes it would be reckless for us to ignore these lessons from history in our consideration of current geopolitical challenges.
In this podcast interview with Robert Amsterdam, Jankowski discusses many of the lesser-known developments in the winter of 1933, from Japan's consolidation of power in China, Mussolini's expansion into Africa, and how disputes over debts and trade broke the alliance structures of 1918. As all these disparate events were taking place, Nazi ideology was quickly devolving into racialist extremism, while attitudes of isolationism and pacificism in France, the UK, and US were preventing any sort of intervention or containment.
Given the current spread of far-right nationalism and populism taking place now, have we managed to learn anything from 1933?
While the Internet has given us a lot of good things, from comprehensive consumer choices to powerful movements to hold the powerful accountable, it also has its darker corners where hatred is thriving, where acts of terrible violence in the real world are inspired.
As a Jewish writer who had often been targeted by anti-Semitic and misogynistic attacks online, Talia Lavin decided to go undercover and dive deep into these strange online worlds, where she finds deeply vulnerable, alienated, and dangerous individuals who pose a considerable threat to society. Her latest book, "Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy," presents a number of real stories of people she encountered during these investigations which helps us understand how extremists find themselves pulled toward white nationalism online.
Lavin argues that it is wrong for us to consider white nationalist terror attacks such as the Charleston Church shooting, the attack on the Christchurch mosque, or the Tree of Life Synogogue shooting in Pittsburg as "lone wolf" attacks. Instead, these attacks are being carried out by individuals who are specifically radicalized.
"It doesn't take that many people influenced by an extremely heightened level of violent rhetoric by a continual saturation in dehumanization to create tremendous amounts of fear and to rip communities apart with grief," Lavin says. "I would say that I'm still pretty scared of these guys. Sometimes their fragility means that they're ripe for mockery. Other times, it means they're ripe to snap."
Lavin and host Robert Amsterdam discuss the history of anti-Semitism in the United States, and how it came to represent a intellectual keystone for US white supremacists, and how, in its international expression, anti-Semitism is trans-partisan, a rhetorical force mobilized on the right and the left.
"The real rhetorical function of the Jew, the reason why Jews are such a persistent target, is that they have more or less assimilated into whiteness," Lavin says. "So they get portrayed by the white power movement in the US as a cunning kind of fifth column subverting whiteness from within. (...) So the primary function that the Jews serve is this idea of a kind of omnipotent, infinitely resourceful, infinitely cunning enemy that is hell bent on your destruction."
And in doing so, Lavin agues, the men hiding in these darkest corners of the Internet come to believe that they are the most oppressed members of society, that it is they who have a duty to right the wrongs - often by violent means.
This week we are pleased to welcome to the podcast Erica De Bruin, an Assistant Professor of Government at Hamilton College and the author of the new book, "How to Prevent Coups d'État: Counterbalancing and Regime Survival."
At the time of this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, the Michigan Republican Party board of electors had refused to certify election results from one of the most populous counties, then certified, then sought to rescind their votes after receiving phone calls from President Donald Trump. Later that same afternoon, President Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani, gave a disturbing press conference chock full of unproven allegations and evidence-free conspiracy theories.
So is this truly a coup attempt?
Not so fast, says Prof. De Bruin, who literally wrote the book on coups.
"Scholars that study coups across the globe understand them to be illegal, overt attempts to seize executive power within a country, backed by the use of force," De Bruin says. "I think that thus far, the actions taken within the Republican party don't fit this definition, but they're incredibly worrying."
"What I think we might be approaching here, if I were to make this argument, is what we think of as a 'self-coup,' where a leader tries to overstay their term in office," De Bruin says. "That typically happens through technically legal means where someone who's in power will try to get a legislature to sign off on delaying elections or will use court challenges to try and reverse an electoral outcome. And that those are the types of steps that these could be laying the groundwork for. (...) Those types of attempts can end up being more successful because they proceed through these supposedly 'legal' means."
Amsterdam and Prof. De Bruin go on to discuss the findings in her book and the strategies that can be put in place to resist coups, as well as discussing the comparative experiences and insights from events in Turkey, Thailand, and Venezuela in recent years.
For the past 70 years, the United States has toyed with interventionism in the Middle East on numerous occasions, from Iran to Afghanistan (twice), Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and Syria, among others. And yet, despite the consistently disastrous consequences of these efforts, the same policies continue to attract support, as US decision-makers consistently underestimate the costs and fail to learn the lessons of the past.
Dr. Philip H. Gordon, a former diplomat and a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, joins the podcast this week to discuss his excellent new book, "Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East."
Although one can sympathize with those suffering under a brutal, tyrannical regime engaged in atrocities, there seems to be a common failure to grasp that when you remove a regime, a security vacuum is opened up where chaos thrives, which is very hard to fill.
"The costs are almost always much higher than anticipated, and there are always many unintended consequences. And that's the history I think we need to keep in mind as we think about it today," Dr. Gordon says. "This is not history for history's sake. This is an active agenda item [as the Trump administration has discussed pursuing regime change in Iran]. Before we do that, we should really think about how we've done it in the past, why we've done it in the past and how it worked out. So maybe we can avoid some of those mistakes in the future."
Instead, Dr. Gordon argues, diplomacy, deterrence, and engagement are much more effective tools to achieve positive outcomes for US interests in the regime. Sanctions, he says, have a limited use in US foreign policy only for specific purposes - however that's often not how we see them used. In the case of the Iran nuclear deal, sanctions were effective because they were broadly implemented internationally and made the negotiation possible. When the goal of sanctions is regime change, Gordon says, it never works. Massive sanctions for decades on Cuba, North Korea, without a specific goal short of regime change, it has been a total failure.
"What I'm opposed to when it comes to sanctions is this fantasy that if you just squeeze hard enough, the regime will actually go away. Most of these regimes, especially the most brutal ones, are willing to see the population suffer infinitely before they're willing to turn over power to someone else," Gordon says.
Having gone through the tumultuous experience of this past election in the United States, with provocative propaganda, disinformation, fake news, and pervasive and extreme distrust, many feel like we're experiencing an unprecedented moment. But arguably, we've been here before.
This week we are joined by Prof. Heidi Tworek, author of "News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945," for a fascinating conversation about the very early days of information warfare, back when when the great powers competed to control and expand their empires through the support of media.
Tworek explains how her years of archival research revealed a concerted effort taking place over the course of 50 years as Germany struggled to gain control over global communications - and nearly succeeded.
Her book News from Germany is not a story about Germany alone. It reveals how news became a form of international power and how communications changed the course of history.
President-elect Joe Biden has won the 2020 US Presidential elections, but outgoing President Donald Trump is continuing with a show of defiance.
Right from the heart of Philadelphia where the final votes are being counted, we are joined by constitutional and international law expert, Prof. William Burke White, who shares his view of what's been happening throughout the long process of the election count, the unexpectedly strong performance of downticket Republican candidates, and President Donald Trump's limited legal remedies to contest the outcome of the election.
Up until his recent resignation due to health concerns, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe cast a long shadow as one of the most remarkable global statesman, shaping the country's alliances and leadership position in an extremely difficult and threatening region of the world.
Journalist and author Tobias Harris, author of "The Iconoclast: Shinzo Abe and the New Japan," joins the Departures podcast to discuss the complexities of the legacy he leaves behind, and the challenges his successor Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga will face.
Harris argues that one aspect of Abe's legacy will be his transcendence of partisan factions, as the coalitional nature of the Liberal Democratic Party allowed the organization to internally battle over policy positions and cabinet positions as opposed to the Prime Minister dictating policy to his party. And yet, despite the cross-factional consensus Abe was able to develop and the nationalist pursuits of great power status and the reforms of Abenomics, "his legacy is one of failure, at least by his own terms," says Harris.
On Wednesday, October 28, 2020 the Republic of Tanzania held presidential elections. Though many feared that it would be neither free nor fair, what came to pass was much worse than could have been imagined.
Robert Amsterdam, the host of this podcast, acts as an international attorney for the main opposition candidate in this election, Tundu Lissu, so consider that a disclaimer that we are not objective.
We did however seek out an expert voice to talk about what is happening in Tanzania and why. Dan Paget, a professor at the University of Aberdeen and the author of numerous academic articles on President John Magufuli and the politics of Tanzania.
"My reaction is one of shock, whether we predicted it or not," says Paget in the interview with Amsterdam. "It's a 'pinch yourself moment' when an election appears to be rigged on this scale and rigged with such audacity, rigged in some ways so blatantly, and in many cases so amateurly, while on top of that, while the election results are still being counted."
"The day-to-day oppression and harassment of the opposition has been a constant feature of Tanzania politics, but never on this scale, not since 1995," says Paget. "So I think that there has been a sea change in the degree of authoritarianism."
During the podcast interview, Paget highlights the view that Magufuli is seeking to make opposition to the state party "inconceivable." Why else would the government move to decapitate the most well known opposition leaders in their own strongholds with so little credibility of doing so?
From 1976-1983, a brutal military dictatorship disappeared some 30,000 citizens and arrested and tortured scores more in Argentina. As a young lawyer at the time known for representing dissidents and political prisoners, Juan Méndez himself was arrested and subjected to torture.
The story of his career, rising to become the Special Rapporteur on Torture to the United Nations, Special Advisor to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, and also Co-Chair of the International Bar Association Human Rights Institute, is a remarkable example of personal experience translating into powerful global advocacy.
Méndez joins the Departures podcast this week along with Alfredo Forti, a member of Amsterdam & Partners LLP, for a discussion on what it was like to live through the dirty war, some of the key cases they've worked on, and the Istanbul Protocol - a new set of proposed guidelines for documenting torture.
A professor of Human Rights Law in residence at the American University – Washington College of Law, Méndez is the author (with Marjory Wentworth) of "Taking A Stand: The Evolution of Human Rights."
Korea is a deeply unique, complex, and interesting place in the world. Upended by repeated waves of war and occupation throughout its history, the modern nation has propulsively launched itself in the stratosphere culturally and economically and grown perhaps faster than any other. This presents undeniable benefits and prosperity, but also a number of accompanying social discontents, from racism to identity fissures to pervasive mental health issues.
Theodore Jun Yoo, an associate professor in the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Yonsei University in Seoul, joins the podcast this week to discuss his very interesting new book, "The Koreas: The Birth of Two Nations Divided."
Jun's book presents a "demythologized history" of the North Korea-South Korea split, with a focus on a number of deeply compelling personal stories and interviews with subjects supported by broad multidisciplinary empirical research.
Why is it that a country that has been so incredibly successful, prosperous, and dynamic should continue to be haunted by such complex social issues? Jun's own family story is just one beginning to a series of interesting ideas exploring the complexity of Korean identity and the impact of "compressed modernity."
We often defer to superlatives when describing our current political age, but the truth is that in many respects, we have been here before.
In the summer of 1901, the tycoon JP Morgan was assembling a merger that would give him a monopoly position over America's railroads. His strong supporter in the White House, President William McKinley, was then suddenly assassinating, bringing a less hospitable interloper into power, President Theodore Roosevelt.
In Susan Berfield's new book, "The Hour of Fate: Theodore Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan, and the Battle to Transform American Capitalism," the reader is brought into close contact with the characters, personalities, and ambitions which would come to define the role of money and raw financial power in US politics.
Speaking with Amsterdam on the podcast, Berfield says she was drawn to the question during this period that is still relevant today - how do we hold business to account and create a version of capitalism that is fairer and more equal?
The story of Roosevelt's first years in power as told by Berfield, coming into direct conflict with one of the world's most powerful business figures, is given an interesting and detailed treatment, and the results sometimes conflict with some of the portrayals we have become accustomed to.
For more than 20 years, Mike Masnick has been writing prolifically on the intersection of technology, freedom of speech, IP law, and politics at the award-winning blog Techdirt, helping to elevate awareness of how these crucial issues are impacting society.
Joining the podcast with Robert Amsterdam today, Masnick discusses the recent drama around the Trump administration's peculiar intervention against the popular Chinese-created video app, TikTok, and what this means for the future free and open internet and innovation in Silicon Valley.
Following last month's executive order to effectively "ban" TikTok from US users (which is now held up in appeals), a number of potential buyers have come forward, interestingly some with close financial ties to the president's re-election campaign.
Masnick is not buying the argument that TikTok represents a unique national security threat to the United States, at least not a threat any different from the common data brokers collecting information from a wide variety of apps.
"There are lots of apps that collect too much data, and there's no evidence that they are doing anything particularly nefarious with it," says Masnick. "If there are concerns about that data and China getting access to it, there are lots of ways that they could get access - for example by just walking up to one of many, often American owned, data brokerage firms and laying down a credit card and pretty much obtaining access to that same data."
Masnick and Amsterdam also discuss the Trump administration's recent interest in repealing Section 230, the cornerstone legal framework that allows for free expression online, as well as the lobbying power of the copyright industry, state-sponsored efforts to spur innovation, and what policies and practices by the big social media companies could have an impact on the upcoming election.
Only a few years after the Arab Spring failed to convert Middle Eastern dictatorships into democracies (with the exception of Tunisia), many scholars and analysts stopped talking about it entirely, as if to pretend these events never took place. Harvard law professor and constitutional scholar Noah Feldman set out to change that with his latest book, "The Arab Winter: A Tragedy."
"Why not try to think through what was good about it, what went wrong in its aftermath, and try to draw some lessons before we just end up in world where it's as though there just never was an Arab Spring," Feldman says.
In his analysis of why for many states democracy failed to take root following these massive public uprisings and cries for self-determination, Feldman argues that most were unprepared for the management of deep divisions in the society.
"The biggest challenges in the aftermath of a democratic transition are how to manage deep social division," Feldman says. "In Egypt, all of the parties were looking for outside actors, to Saudi Arabia, to the United States, and ultimately, the army, having allowed a takeover of a democratic government, changed its mind, and with the collusion of the public, got rid of the democratic government which had been elected."
Amsterdam and Feldman also take the opportunity to discuss the recent death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the politically fraught prospects for the Republican nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett with just weeks to go before the elections.
This week we are pleased to be joined by Kurt Andersen, a polymath Peabody-award winning journalist, novelist, and radio host to talk about his latest book, "Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America."
But before we get into the prerecord discussion of the book, we couldn't resist bringing Kurt back on the show for an update following one of the wildest weekends in American politics, as President Donald Trump was hospitalized for his COVID-19 infection and all the bizarre behavior that has ensued.
Asked by host Robert Amsterdam what he makes of this bewildering but not unexpected turn of events, Andersen compares the experience to watching a television series, as Americans are left to wonder why the writers are trying to cram too much incident not just into the last episode, but the last 30 minutes.
Judging by the video of the maskless ceremony in the Rose Garden last week, Andersen argues that Republican elites had "convinced themselves that the fantasy they were purveying, that this isn't really a problem, was true."
Andersen's book "Evil Geniuses" spans a much broader section of recent American political history well before the election of Donald Trump, focusing on the early 1970s, highlighting many events and trends that made it possible to arrive to our current moment. Much of the book focuses on the willing role played by later Democratic administrations of advancing and consolidating a version of liberal economic policy that would later decimate social equality in the country, right at the same moment that the country began to stagnate culturally, with an emphasis on deepening nostalgia for decades past.
Andersen discusses with Amsterdam why he chose to focus on this particular inflection point, when America stopped becoming more progressive and equal, and turned toward rolling back the New Deal consensus and put in place a different system that prioritized "market-based solutions" for all social problems.
Like no other president before him, Donald Trump and his inner circle have sought to monetize the White House - but has it been a good business?
Dan Alexander, a journalist at Forbes and the author of the new book, "White House Inc.: How Donald Trump Turned the Presidency Into a Business," joins the podcast to discuss in detail the assets and revenues of the Trump empire, and how what's been presented in the New York Times' reporting on his tax returns may not be the complete picture.
Shortly before we recorded the episode, the bombshell news broke that President Trump had tested positive for COVID-19. Alexander offers his analysis on how he believes that will impact the election.
FDR and Churchill. Kennedy and Macmillan. Reagan and Thatcher. Bush and Blair. Trump and Johnson.
The so-called "special relationship" enjoyed between the United States and the United Kingdom in the past 75 years since the end of World War II, often guided by the personalities of the respective individual leaders, has come to define so much of what we understand about the liberal world order. And yet today we now find a US and UK who are turning their backs on that order with an uncertain future ahead.
Ian Buruma joins Robert Amsterdam on the podcast this week to discuss his new book, "The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, from Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit."
Speaking on the podcast, Buruma says that his book presents a history that challenges many of the myths of Churchill as a wartime hero and likewise Chamberlain as a failed symbol of appeasement.
"Out of the glory of winning the war, with of course the vital help of the Soviet Union, the British and the Americans got rather high on the idea of using military force to spread freedom and democracy all over the world, and Winston Churchill became the model for a lot of US presidents to follow," Buruma says.
This unfortunate tendency has led to a lot of foolish wars, perhaps most notably the ill-fated adventure into Iraq under Bush-Blair, which in turn has brought the special relationship to the breaking point.
Buruma and Amsterdam explore the questions of how we got here and what comes next.
There are few other countries in history with Russia's record of foreign intrigue. High-level assassinations of prominent dissidents, including the nuclear poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London, Sergei Skripal in Salisburg, the most recent poisoning of Alexei Navalny presumably in Siberia followed by his recovery in Germany, have come to shape global perceptions of Russia - perhaps based in fear, but also characterized by instability.
Andrei Soldatov, one of Russia's most revered and deeply sourced journalists specializing in the intelligence services, joins Robert Amsterdam on the podcast this week to discuss his latest book co-authored with Irina Borogan, "The Compatriots: The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia's Exiles, Émigrés, and Agents Abroad."
Soldatov argues with Amsterdam that the choice of poisons such as Novichok, a highly controlled substance, to carry out these attempted assassinations is not accidental, and is instead actually quite strategic.
"It's actually very smart. It's only about the message, and only partly about removing a troublemaker. It's about how to make it absolutely clear to a very big crowd that now the rules are changing," Soldatov says. "Poisoning means that the tragedy is lasting, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks. And not only is the target suffering, but people around him or her are also suffering. It sends a very powerful message."
Soldatov also relates an amusing story of recording a mockumentary with the US television host Stephen Colbert, when they visit room 1101 of the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Moscow, the location cited in the Steele Dossier on potential kompromat held against Donald Trump. What they accidentally find is quite interesting.
For many years now, China and Japan have not enjoyed very good relations. In fact, highly volatile and emotional issues of territory, history, and identity have escalated dangerously. But are these historical issues largely a political construction, and do in fact the two nations have more in common in terms of interests and history than they are able to see?
Professor of International Relations Barry Buzan joins the podcast this week to discuss his fascinating new book coauthored with Evelyn Goh titled: "Rethinking Sino-Japanese Alienation: History Problems and Historical Opportunities."
Dr. Buzan argues that China and Japan exhibit foreign policy behavior that prioritizes domestic politics, with little regard for the outside countries.
"Most countries are 'autistic' in their foreign policy behavior, in the sense that their behavior is much more internally driven than externally driven, think of Brexit in Britain or what's going on in the US at the moment," Dr. Buzan says. "But in Japan and China, it is pretty extreme. These countries are not taking each other into account as an audience. Quite a bit of the Chinese rhetoric practically demands an unconditional surrender of identity from Japan, they don't give the Japanese the chance to have a self-respecting identity or history that they can embrace with honor."
Dr. Buzan argues that there are actually very strong historical similarities between China's rise since the 1970s and Japan's pre-war empire - there's just 100 years in between them, and the many small differences, which are more and more intensely felt, have made it impossible for the two countries to come to terms with each other.
Amsterdam and Buzan further discuss what Sino-Japanese relations may mean as the US role in the region continues to deteriorate, and how Japan may find itself being placed in an unenviable position between Washington and Beijing unless they can overcome some of these longstanding historical problems and make a breakthrough.
The deepening economic inequality being experienced in the United States has brought with it considerable cultural and political problems, the most interesting being the popularity of the Republican Party among lower income groups, despite a policy agenda that is decidedly hostile to their own economic interests.
The answer, argue political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their new book "Let Them Eat Tweets," resides in the plutocrats using more and more aggressive instrumentalization of resentment and racism to push through their unpopular platform.
Hacker and Pierson join Robert Amsterdam on the podcast to discuss the main arguments of the book and how the United States has arrived to this dangerous precipice, with the ominous approach of the 2020 presidential elections this fall.
Over the past number of years, Washington has come to regard strategic competition with China through a rather narrow lens of trade, national security, and diplomacy, while paying much less attention to Beijing's ambitions to increase its influence across the Eurasian basin, from Pakistan to Kazakhstan and Iran.
Daniel Markey, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a South Asia expert who previously worked at the Council on Foreign Relations and the US Department of State, is the author of the new book "China's Western Horizon: Beijing and the New Geopolitics of Eurasia."
In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam about his book, Markey explains that China has become more and more aggressive in its campaign for influence in this part of the world, while Washington has yet to adapt to the new reality.
Markey pays specific attention to how the Chinese are received in these countries - and it is not always with open arms.
"The Chinese are not loved in Iran by the public, and increasingly, they are seen in even more skeptical terms as the Iranian regime has cozied up to the Chinese state," Markey says. "Technology, surveillance, political repression - these are all things the Chinese are very capable of doing and sell to Iran," which creates a "cleavage" between Iranian elites and the public in terms of how they regard China.
We often discuss Russia's actions during the 2016 US election as though it were something "unprecedented." But in fact, there is a long established history of Russia, the Soviet Union before it, and the United States engaging in widespread efforts to interfere in elections around the world. The more important question is what to do about it.
David Shimer, a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center, joins the podcast to discuss this question and more from his latest book, "Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference."
Speaking with host Robert Amsterdam, Shimer argues that we need to restore the historical perspective on covert election interference in order to formulate an effective response - to understand that no, this is not anything new, but that there are clear actions that can be taken. Shimer discusses the important distinction between Russia's intentions to covertly influence US public opinion vs. attempts to physically change or alter ballots and voting systems infrastructure. The crucial failure of the Barack Obama administration was to be overly concerned about the latter risk, and to fail to act preventively to deter the former, he argues.
While we have seen many examples around the world of political leaders openly seeking Washington's or Moscow's support during an election, it is more rare for a US leader to invite that interference as then-candidate and current President Trump has done.
"Donald Trump has openly solicited foreign help, he also has been very reluctant to confront Russia over its interference in our elections, he has at times sided with the assessment of Vladimir Putin over that of our own intelligence service and that matters, because what that signals to Russia is that they can push farther without experiencing any consequences," Shimer says.
"If you are Russia right now, you do have to make a calculation about where to interfere, how to interfere, but you know for sure that America is already a mess in terms of its actual societal functioning. So it's not like we will have a unified response if Russia does push forward, and Russia also knows that the president has been deferential to Russia's president for the last four years, which is a recipe for a pretty bad outcome for America's perspective, but it remains to be seen just how far Russia will choose to go in subverting this election."
The proliferation of nuclear weapons during the Cold War in a way served as a deterrent for conflict between nations - the power of these weapons was so overwhelming and the potential consequences of any action so irreversible, it was possible to sustain a long period of détente. But as technology evolved, and micro-aggressions of state-sponsored hacking became the norm, the logic was flipped and we found ourselves with almost no restraint in terms of acts of cyber warfare among nations.
Ben Buchanan, a professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, joins Robert Amsterdam on this episode of Departures to discuss his new book, "The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics."
Buchanan argues that we can see just how extensive the hacking wars have gone by examining the details.
"If you are looking for scenarios of planes crashing and cities burning, you miss some of the activities that matter most," Buchanan says. "This is a book about the stories that actually happened, the events that have shaped global affairs over the last two decades where nations have hacked one another."
Amsterdam and Buchanan discuss how the lack of policies, treaties, and law to regulate cyber warfare have created a Hobbesian chaotic environment in which unpredictable, dangerous, and costly outcomes become more and more likely.
"I think every nation of a certain degree of sophistication looks at hacking tools right now, and says I can use these to advance my interests, I don't trust the other side not to use them, and you get into this dog-eat-dog world, in which everyone is continually struggling for advantage in trying to shape the environment, just a little bit every single day, into their favor," Buchanan says.
"These events are extraordinary ones, but daily ones."
Following the demise of the Nazi regime in Germany at the end of the second World War, European nations set about a series of reforms to their political systems which would continue to entail popular representation expressed through a stronger set of institutions, bureaucracy, and law to constrain the potential abuses which sparked the war.
Oxford historian Martin Conway has recently published a fascinating study of this period in his book, "Western Europe’s Democratic Age 1945-1968."
In this conversation with Robert Amsterdam, Conway explains that we have been remarkably fortunate with the success of these efforts, as we often forget that there was never any sort of preordained roadmap for Europe to follow. The democratic models that evolved during this period were the result of complex social forces, economic interests, and historical experiences and could have easily failed.
Conway said that the lessons that most European elites drew from the Weimar Republic was that there had been "too much democracy," and that there should be measures in place to check politicians from exploiting the worst instincts of the public.
"The democracy that is brought in after 1945 is one that is deliberately intended by its architects, essentially elite figures, was to produce a rather managed and controlled form of politics. An they certainly didn't look to America for that - they looked to America and they saw a demagogic, corrupt politics that they really wanted to avoid," Conway says.
Reflecting on the more recent period, Conway offers his perspective that we are already living in a different age in which we have no consensus about the political regime we should all be supporting.
"We now live in a rather post-democratic age where we no longer entirely have confidence, faith, engagement in the institutions that rule us," he says.
One wonders what changes the next phase of democracy will bring.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States engaged in a relentless anticommunism crusade which included the sponsorship of mass killings, coups, and installations of authoritarian regimes across much of the global South, from Indonesia to Brazil.
In his fascinating new book, "The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World," journalist and author Vincent Bevins explores some fascinating personal testimonials of survivors and their families, and studies how this pattern of conduct by the United States often resulted in structural, systemic defects in many of the countries which to this today continues to impede the consolidation of democracy and stability.
Most Americans, and many in the media and pundit class, continue to overlook the human toll that it took for the United States to win the Cold War, and defer to an attitude of exceptionalism. Bevins argues that we need to overcome this and grapple with how our actions impacted these countries.
"There's a contradiction between empire and democracy - when you are a regular person that has to put food on the table for your family, you have your own things to worry about, but then you are also supposed to pay attention to what your government is doing and understand how to say yes or no to certain actions," Bevins says, and how is one expected to do that when the US has been active in 180 countries all around the world.
"However much you love the United States, you still have a moral responsibility to know your own history and to criticize yourself first," he argues, pointing out that media narratives need to be more realistic about the context of how other countries view the United States based on the history of intervention.
With a focus on the overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia and the installation of the brutal Suharto regime, Bevins raises the interesting question of whether or not it was even necessary to kill 1 million people during those years.
"What if there had never been this violent attempt to crush Indonesian democracy from 1955-1959? What if he were allowed to oversee a multiparty democracy in which the Indonesian Communist Party just existed, winning 30-40% of the votes and influencing policy but not carrying out a revolution. This is what Italy was like during the Cold War, this is what France was like during the Cold War."
But we can never know what the alternative history would be.
In 1942, Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle led an audacious one-way bombing raid to hit targets in Japan which many thought impossible. With nowhere to land their planes, eight American airmen who were captured afterward by Japanese troops in occupied Chinese territory, and later subjected to trials and death sentences.
In his fascinating new book, "Last Mission to Tokyo: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice," Columbia Law Professor Michel Paradis takes the reader deep inside the first postwar war crimes tribunals organized by the Allies in Shanghai, which included trials of lawyers involved in the prosecution of the captured Doolittle airmen.
In speaking with Robert Amsterdam about the book, Paradis remarks that much of the prosecutions that took place following the war were quite flawed examples of "victors' justice," but nevertheless set important precedent.
"When we fall short in upholding justice, and we fall into the trap of victors' justice and revenge and show trials, you end up creating really unpredictable outcomes," Paradis says. "Now, here in 2020, 75 years later, Yamashita's trial is remembered as an outrage. (...) And we don't remember Yamashita as the really horrible fascist war criminal that he was. This is an issue that I try to explore in the book."
Tundu Lissu is not known for backing down from a challenge.
From his humble roots growing up herding cattle in Central Tanzania to his British education and legal practice, he rose to a senior position in the CHADEMA opposition party. As a vocal critic challenging the alleged human rights abuses of President John Magufuli, in 2017 he survived an attempted assassination in which he was shot 16 times.
On this podcast, Tundu is interviewed by his international lawyer Robert Amsterdam, and shares his views on what motivated him to go back home and contest for the presidency.
As the Syrian conflict has raged on for almost a decade, and the United Nations is hamstrung with Russia's veto power over proposed legal instruments to intervene, international law finds itself being innovated at light speed in response.
Michael Scharf, the co-dean of the Law School of Case Western Reserve University and the co-author of "The Syrian Conflict's Impact on International Law," joins the podcast this week to discuss the effect of the Syrian conflict on the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, and whether or not these recent precedents are sustainable in the long term.
Scharf asks if the bombing of Syrian chemical weapons facilities, which was carried out under the ambit of humanitarian intervention by a handful of nations, will be seen as broad precedent that could be invoked over other international crises, or if it will be seen to be much more limited for use only against countries deploying biological warfare.
In this discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Scharf proposes that the conflict has rapidly crystallized new international legal rules and significantly altered previous international approaches in classic “Grotian moments," referring to 17th century legal scholar Hugo Grotius, referring to a “paradigm-shifting development in which new rules and doctrines of customary international law emerge with unusual rapidity and acceptance.”
As the trade war heats up between the United States and China, the strategic calculations on behalf of both Donald Trump and Xi Jinping bear increasing levels of risk of the confrontation spinning out of control.
Joining the podcast this episode are two Wall Street Journal reporters, Bob Davis and Lingling Wei, whose new book "Superpower Showdown: How the Battle Between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War" examines the history driving the current trade dispute and the behind the scenes thinking that continues to mischaracterize and misunderstand how we find our way back to détente.
"One thing we try to do in this book is illustrate the kinds of calculations that both sides had done that brought the relationship closer and closer to this new cold war," says Lingling Wei.
"Constantly the Chinese side would overestimate their leverage over the American side," she says. "To them, its biggest leverage throughout these negotiations was soybeans. They knew that agricultural purchases were something near and dear to Trump's heart. (...) They played this card over and over again, and it backfired."
As a career foreign service officer, Elizabeth Shackelford was seen as a rising star in the US State Department, a recipient of the Barbara Watson Award for Consular Excellence. But in 2017 she resigned from public service, publishing a stinging indictment of a letter which brought to light the extraordinary mismanagement and strategic drift under then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
In Shackelford's new book, "The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age," she takes the reader inside the collapse of the U.S. diplomatic effort in South Sudan, which had fallen into a pernicious civil war with Washington left backing a murderous dictator.
"The role of diplomacy in our national security toolbox has really been downgraded and diminished in recent years, really over the past 20 years as the military's role has become the primary tool we are using," says Shackelford. "We aren't just ineffective. We're counterproductive."
Shackelford says that the picture of the coronavirus pandemic would be entirely different if we were leading with diplomacy.
"It is costing Americans dearly that we are not integrated with the global response," she says. "We would be well-coordinated with our European and Asian allies in terms of the supplies we need and how we manage things like our totally intertwined economies and trade. But instead, we've really cut off all those opportunities."
With assassinations taking place on foreign soil, widespread hacking and disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining democratic elections, and provocations of armed conflict across multiple theaters, Russia's role in the post-Cold War international system under President Vladimir Putin has been that of a disrupter. But they've likely never had a more powerful weapon at their disposal than the current president of the United States, Donald Trump.
Luke Harding, an author and journalist who served for years as the Guardian's correspondent in Moscow, has recently published a fascinating new book examining the crucial developments that led us to our current problems with Russia, entitled "Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West."
In this interview with Robert Amsterdam, Harding discusses some of the book's heroes and anti-heroes, with a special focus on the deeply peculiar relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin dating back to the infamous summit in Helsinki.
"It was that notorious meeting where Trump stood next to Putin and said, 'I don't believe that Vladimir interfered; he's given me his word,'" Harding says. "And I think that this was possibly the worst moment of his presidency, where even people who had previously been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, realized that he is profoundly compromised, and for whatever reason, he's doing Moscow's bidding."
As an attorney, distinguished diplomat, academic and author, there are few public officials with careers as varied and impressive as Philip Zelikow. He served as the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, was the author of the "Zelikow memo" disputing the legal grounds of torture of terrorism detainees, and co-authored books with former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and recently published on "strategy corruption" in Foreign Affairs.
In this wide-ranging discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Zelikow talks about his work deconstructing the Suez crisis of 1956, how to consider history and decisionmaking without 20/20 hindsight, and what mistakes the Trump administration is making by concentrating solely on the culture war as opposed to focusing on what outputs and results they want from global diplomatic engagement.
Zelikow explains in detail his most recent work on "strategic corruption," in which other nations exploit openings for lawlessness in the United States.
"I do think that this administration has opened itself up to corruption in a way that no American administration has ever done in the history of the United States," says Zelikow. "I think this is actually a more corruption administration than the Harding administration or the Grant administration, and that foreigners have taken advantage of this."
He argues: "This concern crosses party lines. There is not a party that says corruption is good. But there is an administration which has left itself enormously vulnerable to it, and actually, quite deliberately plotted by foreigners who are using our vulnerability to get policy objectives they want in Europe and Asia."
The United States has enjoyed a position of relative primacy in the international system since the end of World War II, but are those days numbered as China and other powers continue to rise? Or does Washington still have a few more decades left in the tank?
Matthew Kroenig, a political scientist and the Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, has a decidedly more optimistic view of the capacity of American democracy to help the country prevail in the new rivalries with China and Russia.
On the podcast, Kroenig discusses these questions by taking a critical look at the strengths of weaknesses of democracies vs. autocracies by highlighting seven different confrontations between rivals, from from ancient Greece to the Cold War.
In his new book, "The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy versus Autocracy from the Ancient World to the U.S. and China," he argues that although democracies do not always win wars, they do have outsized strategic advantages in comparison to autocracies, from culture to innovation to the financial strength of a world reserve currency.
When you are "the capital of capital," Kroenig argues, you have a major advantage in your ability to deficit spend and build up your capabilities, and we've always seen international finance exist in more open societies, from Venice to Amsterdam to London to Wall Street.
"Autocracies historically don't do well when it comes to international finance," Kroenig says. "People don't trust investing in autocratic countries, and it's also because to have a financial system you have to allow the free flow of currency, money, in and out of your borders, and autocracies don't like allowing things flowing in and out of their borders."
In this regard, he points out, China is not even particularly trying hard to make the RMB a reserve currency, while President Xi appears to be prioritizing political control over economic growth by increasing the Communist Party's control over the economy.
Numerous others we've had on the podcast take the opposite view, that we are witnessing the final days of American hegemony. Time will tell us who is right, it seems.
For fans of legal fiction, there are few characters more memorable than Scott Turow's protagonist, Alejandro “Sandy” Stern, whose crusading work as a defense counsel first appeared in his 1987 book, "Presumed Innocent."
Now, with Turow's latest novel, "The Last Trial," it appears we are witnessing the end of a long arc of a beloved character.
In this discussion with Robert Amsterdam, Scott Turow talks about what went into the creation of Sandy Stern, and the process by which he plots his many bestselling legal thrillers. Amsterdam and Turow share their contrasting experiences of large firm and small firm defense counsel, and how lawyers must manage the role fully investing themselves, personally and emotionally, into the cause of their clients, sometimes with the consequences that may bear.
"I think that the transmission of motif and milieu and information from my practice to my novels is pretty obvious," says Turow. "It keeps me current on the law, gives me a sense of what's going on now. On the other hand, occasionally it's useful to be the novelist in the courtroom."
The United States has risen to its position of primacy thanks to a carefully constructed system of alliances with numerous other countries. That system, however, has suffered significant damage in recent years, is under increasing attack both at home and abroad, and desperately needs rebuilding, argues Mira Rapp-Hooper, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center.
In this interview with Robert Amsterdam, Rapp-Hooper discusses her new book, Shields of the Republic, which she describes as "a story of an American strategy," and how this successful alliance strategy has come under attack and now finds itself in peril.
"When alliances are working, we do not see them at all. They are measured by the crises and wars that never happen," Rapp-Hooper says. "Washington is now running out of time to save this remarkable system of pacts, but it really does need it more than ever."
The author also discusses how rival nations such as China and Russia have actively attacked the US alliance system with hybrid warfare and disinformation campaigns, while at the same time expanding their footprint of influence in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Last month, the White House issued an executive order to apply terrorism-style sanctions such as bank account and asset seizure orders against members of the International Criminal Court (ICC), presumably as a response to express disapproval of a war crimes investigation related to events in Afghanistan.
William Burke-White, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and policy advisor who worked at State Department under the Obama administration, joins Departures this week to talk about these sanctions against the ICC and other issues surrounding the declining support for international legal institutions seen during the past four years of the Trump administration.
Prof. Burke-White shares his insights about how the effort to construct global legal structures to put an end to impunity have crashed up against the prerogatives of power, and why the United States, especially when competing with a rising China, should have a strong interest to support international rule of law and strengthen these systems while we still have the ability to influence the process.
For 175 years, well before the young Mao Zedong began his Long March, two rival Jewish dynasties dominated Chinese business and politics, accumulating massive wealth and power while navigating the tumultuous history of the period before losing nearly everything once the Communists swept into power.
Jonathan Kaufman, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and the author of the "The Last Kings of Shanghai," joins Robert Amsterdam on the podcast to discuss the fascinating stories of these two families, the Sassoons and the Kadoories, and how their tremendous impact on China can still be felt and observed today.
"When you go to Shanghai, you can see how Shanghai was the New York or London of its time. Charlie Chaplin would go there. Noel Coward would go there. It was a crossroads for business, it was really the first globalized city. So a lot of the issues we deal with today with globalization including poverty and inequity, but also the breaking down of borders, Shanghai represented," Kaufman says.
Kaufman points out these complexities aren't always recognized in Chinese history during our current moment of inward-looking nationalism, and that we sometimes forget that there is another history of a country that championed economic dynamism, that led with openness, and had great success in working with the West.
For many years, Africa's natural resource wealth, young population, and vibrant societies have raised many hopes for a rapid emergence on the world's stage - but the development of these opportunities has often slow and uneven. So what is holding the region back?
John Campbell, a former US Ambassador to Nigeria, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and author of multiple books on the region, joins Departures this week to discuss a wide range of trends he sees taking precedence, from Nigeria to Kenya to South Africa.
Looking at the relatively disappointing results of President Muhummudu Buhari in Nigeria, Ambassador Campbell points to the country's unfortunate history. "Nigerians like to say that the present government is a colonial government. The only difference is that instead of being run by the British, it is run by a homegrown elite," Ambassador Campbell says.
Speaking about how the African public views the recent protest movements over racial inequality in the United States, Ambassador Campbell says it depends which audience you are talking about.
"African elites by and large, don't like demonstrations. The kind of demonstrations that have taken place in Washington and other American cities, if that were to happen in Africa, they would turn against the government very fast," he says. But others feel encouraged that mass movements can be for good causes that they clearly understand. As one Nigerian said to him, "Well, 'black lives matter' in the United States, but in much of Africa, no lives matter."
Lastly, when speaking about the ongoing rot of authoritarianism in Africa with regimes like Museveni in Uganda and Biya in Cameroon, Ambassador Campbell warns against the US overemphasizing "stability."
"We've made this kind of mistake before and it always ends up to be extremely costly. Whenever we violate our ideals, we end up paying a heavy price for it," he says.
So much of the peace and prosperity achieved following the end of World War II and past the end of the Cold War was rooted in a common civilizational grammar driving foreign policy, an imagined community of nations referred to as "The West" based on a set of Enlightenment ideas. But then we lost confidence in that cultural narrative, and gradually many in the United States abandoned the Jeffersonian West of liberty, multilateralism and rule of law in favor of an ethno-religious-nationalist line of thinking.
That's the argument that we discuss with Prof. Michael Kimmage, PhD, a former diplomat and professor of history at Catholic University who has written a fascinating new book, The Abandonment of the West.
During the interview, Amsterdam and Kimmage discuss why Donald Trump may be the first non-Western president of the United States, how a lack of diversity and participation in foreign affairs leadership by African Americans has weakened the notion of the West, and how we can reconfigure the conception of the West in ways which can override the polarization dividing the country today.
There are few other countries in the world that have wielded money and influence as well as the modern Russian state, to the point of purchasing impunity and acquiescence to their status quo. And this is not all simply because of a "master strategy" by Vladimir Putin, but instead a vast and complex system of illicit enrichment and state capture by his network of siloviki and willing oligarch businessmen.
It is this network and its operative methods that is the focus of a fascinating new book by former Financial Times journalist Catherine Belton.
Belton joins with Robert Amsterdam on the Departures to talk about the conclusions and findings of her book, while also reminiscing about what's changed since the two of them shared many long days on the court benches of Moscow's Meshchansky Court during the first trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
For experts who spend their careers studying modern authoritarianism, it has only recently become prudent to apply their analytical skillset to talking about political developments in the United States.
Journalist and author Sarah Kendzior, who stood out in 2015 as one of the lone voices warning that Donald Trump was going to win the presidency, speaks with Robert Amsterdam about her latest book, "Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America."
"It's always encouraging when you see masses of people rise up, especially when they're doing so on behalf of another," said Kenzior of the recent protests for black lives. In her view, the pandemic and the allyship on display are intimately connected: the Trump administration's failure to respond to the coronavirus "told white America once and for all: you, too, are disposable."
But she also sees a strong case for a call to action: "When I talk to my children, I try to teach it to them in terms of history, both so that they know the roots of the crisis, but also that they understand the way that people have pushed back against past injustices, and sometimes won. (...) That it's not easy, that it's not this arc of justice bending naturally toward triumph. It's the result of people's will to fight oppressive forces, and that's what we have to do now."
Earlier this month marked the 31st anniversary of Tiannanmen Square, while during this same period, the same Chinese Communist Party solidified its grip on Hong Kong with the passage of a new national security law that would subject Hong Kongers to extradition and Chinese legal jurisdiction.
These events are just examples of the extreme lengths Beijing will go to demonstrate its commitment to avoiding a collapse similar to that of the Soviet Union, argues Jean-Pierre Cabestan during his interview on Departures with Robert Amsterdam.
Cabestan is the author of the book "China Tomorrow: Democracy or Dictatorship," and discusses with Amsterdam his theory that although the one-party authoritarian state has a long life line left, eventually as prosperity grows the pressures will increase for more representative forms of government that may ultimately become unsustainable for the regime. But this is unlikely to happen for decades, says Cabestan, as we are observing a highly adaptive regime absorb crisis, pivot, and change strategies in whatever form or function may support their goal of stability and growth at the expense of liberties and democracy.
There is really no shared political ideology, there is no general set of policies, that are common among populists like Vladimir Putin to Donald Trump, or Viktor Orban, or Jair Bolsonaro and so on. What unites them is that they are all nostalgists, that they have mobilized an imagined version of each country's historical past greatness and put that at the core of their political messaging, argues author Peter Pomerantsev in a discussion with Robert Amsterdam.
According to Pomerantsev, none of these leaders have any coherent vision of the future that they present to voters, and this absence of any conception of future is a problem deeply rooted in the information wars which have moved from the obscurity of the post-Soviet space into the mainstream of U.S. politics.
Pomerantsev's excellent new book, "This Is Not Propaganda," explores these theories and looks at how the manipulation of media, memory, and reality is having a direct personal and social impact on the lives of everyone living in these countries.