Podcasts about Foreign Policy Research Institute

In the past week, 30 Ukrainians have died and more than 163 others injured as Russia escalated its bombing campaign amid U.S. efforts to end the war. It prompted President Trump to lash out at not only Russian President Putin, but also Ukrainian President Zelenskyy. Laura Barrón-López discussed more with retired Army Col. Robert Hamilton of the Foreign Policy Research Institute's Eurasia Program. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

This week technologist Joel Burke, author of the recently published Rebooting a Nation: The Incredible Rise of Estonia, E-Government and the Startup Revolution, joins Indra Ekmanis on the Baltic Ways podcast.He shares his insights on Estonia's rise as a leader in e-government, technological exports in a globalized world, and what the US has to learn from Estonia in a moment of disruption. Baltic Ways is a podcast from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI. Get full access to FPRI Insights at fpriinsights.substack.com/subscribe

In a little more than 100 days, Donald Trump has set about dismantling much of the international order that has prevailed since World War II. That's true of traditional U.S. approaches to trade, to conflict, alliances, international organizations, and more. But as much as we focus on Trump, Michael Beckley argues that much of this change in U.S. foreign policy has deeper roots, going to the very nature of American power. The United States is increasingly a “rogue superpower,” Beckley has written, “neither internationalist nor isolationist but aggressive, powerful, and increasingly out for itself.” How this America interacts, not just with adversaries like China but also with allies and others, may be the most important question in geopolitics today. Beckley is an associate professor of political science at Tufts University, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Asia director at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and has been one of the sharpest analysts of American grand strategy in an era of deepening great-power competition.  Beckley joined Dan Kurtz-Phelan on May 13 to discuss both the resilience of American power and the risks to it—and what the global transformation now underway will mean for U.S. interests going forward. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview. 

On this episode of #TheGlobalExchange, Colin Robertson sits down with Robert Kaplan to discuss his new book "Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis". // Participants' bios Robert Kaplan is the bestselling author of twenty-three books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including Waste Land, The Loom of Time, The Tragic Mind, Adriatic, The Revenge of Geography, Asia's Cauldron, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. // Host bio: Colin Robertson is a former diplomat and Senior Advisor to the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, www.cgai.ca/colin_robertson // Reading Recommendations: - "Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis" by Robert Kaplan - "Kaplan's ‘Waste Land': Between a Bang and a Whimper" by Colin Robertson - "The Greatest Short Stories of Leo Tolstoy" by Leo Tolstoy // Music Credit: Drew Phillips | Producer: Jordyn Carroll // Recording Date: April 30, 2025 Release date: May 5, 2025

Ukrainians have resisted Russia's aggression for years. Since the full-scale invasion of their country in 2022, Ukrainian women in particular have taken on important roles on the frontlines, in civil society, and at home. Gražina Bielousova's research examines how Ukrainian leftist feminists advocate for their causes at home and abroad, facing distinct sets of challenges as they attempt to defend their country. The Ukrainian case is also distinct in comparison to Latvia and Lithuania, whose organizing takes on different shapes for the same cause. Bielousova joins Ben Gardner-Gill to explain these interactions and discuss the ongoing process of decolonization in Baltic Studies.TranscriptBen Gardner-Gill: Hello, and welcome to Baltic Ways. I'm your co-host, Ben Gardner-Gill. Today we're talking with Gražina Belousova. Gražina is a feminist scholar of race, religion, and gender in post-Soviet Europe. She earned her PhD from Duke University in 2022. Currently, she is a postdoctoral scholar at Vilnius University's Institute of International Relations and Political Science and a researcher at Vytautas Magnus University.Her current research project focuses on leftist feminisms in East Europe in light of Russia's war against Ukraine, which will culminate in her first book, What's Left of Feminism in East Europe.Gražina, welcome to Baltic Ways.Gražina Belousova: Thank you so much for having me, Ben.BGG: So let's kick off by just hearing a little bit more about your background. I know you finished your PhD pretty recently. Could you tell us a little bit more about how you got into academia, sort of your research interests, and what you're working on at the moment?GB: Right. Yes, I just defended my PhD in 2022. It's hard to believe that it's been nearly three years now. In my PhD, I focused on historical matters. My PhD was in religion and cultural anthropology. And one of the things that I found missing when I was trying to theorize the part of the world that I call home and that most of the world calls Eastern Europe—I realized that I was lacking a solid theory that would bridge economics, anthropology, and religious studies.I wanted to understand how religious difference, especially perceived religious difference, played a role in creating the space that we call Eastern Europe today. And that took me to 18th and 19th century travel writings by Western travelers, oftentimes who were on an official mission, to the edges or to the depths of the Russian Empire.So I've read a lot of ambassadors' letters. I've read a lot of dispatches from St. Petersburg and Moscow, trying to understand how Westerners thought about that religious difference and how that thinking structured their understanding of what this place was and why it was different. What I tried to argue is actually that perceived religious difference was at the root of thinking of Eastern Europe as something different.Now, when I chose to embark on that topic, I had to put another topic aside, which was the question of very contemporary matters, the question of leftist political thought and feminism. At that point, it felt to me more pertinent to write the kind of theory that I felt was missing. When I was given the opportunity to pursue a postdoctoral position at Vilnius University Institute of International Relations and Political Science, I pitched this idea to them.And we very quickly pulled together the application. And the next thing I knew, I was embarking on a project on leftist feminisms in Eastern Europe in light of the war in Ukraine. So, the path was windy, but here I am today, knees and elbows deep, in the project on leftist feminism.BGG: Wonderful. I mean, a windy path is going to be familiar to so many people listening.So, no surprise and no surprise as well that the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has really impacted your work and your life as it has for many of us. So tell us a little bit more about that.Over the last three years, we've been watching and seeing the horrors in Ukraine. From your perspective, from your academic work, what are some of the main things that you're looking at?GB: One of the things that I'm particularly interested in is the way that groups that are on the edges of society, on the margins of society, such as leftists, such as feminists, and especially leftist feminists—when the two come together and try to articulate their social and political vision and explain to themselves and to their fellow compatriots and oftentimes foreign donors, in my case, also Western leftist feminists, their relevance, how they're trying to articulate their position.War has a penchant for heightening nationalist tendencies. And this is not some kind of particular Eastern European pathology. War anywhere is going to produce these results. That is normal. People defend themselves and articulate themselves on the basis on which they're being attacked, on the basis on which they're being bombed.So this is what we are seeing in Ukraine. Leftism in Eastern Europe, because of the Soviet past, is often associated with Soviet nostalgia. Feminism, on the other hand, is oftentimes seen as something antithetical to national identity, something that is imported from the West, and something that either has no relevance or can be dangerous, especially when questions of national unity, questions of national defense come about.That is one of the reasons why I embarked on this journey, and this is one of the reasons why Ukraine had to be part of this picture. Because while the other countries that I'm looking at—Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Moldova—experience the threat of invasion, Ukraine is under attack.And one of the things that I'm finding is that Ukrainian leftist feminists are incredibly resourceful and incredibly gifted at articulating their relevance.One of the things that I'm going to say that stems from that understanding of leftist feminism that's erroneous, but that's pervasive, is that Ukrainian leftist feminists do not debate the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state. What is in question is the way things are happening under the conditions of war.The questions of most vulnerable people—so questions of what happens with people with disabilities, questions of what happens to single mothers, questions of what happens to the elderly people who are maybe unable to evacuate, questions of what happens to the working class people—all of these things are at the forefront of their minds. They're trying to be the advocates of their pleas to the larger society, while at the same time trying to articulate Ukraine's right to self-defense to Western leftist feminists.BGG: So they have both this tension, maybe tension is the wrong word, tell me if it isn't, but they have this tension internally where they're trying to advocate for what they see as justice or what is right with a domestic audience who, understandably, may be more frequently focused on what's happening at the front lines.And then there's also this international question, the foreign audience for these Ukrainian leftist feminists, who have a very different perspective on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. And I specifically use that verbiage instead of Russia's invasion of Ukraine because they're going to think about it very differently.So let's split those out a little bit, and I want to start with the domestic. You talked about the advocacy of these leftist feminists for the most marginalized groups in society, for those who are most vulnerable.In your view, where have they been most successful, perhaps? Where have they seen actual progress happen from their advocacy?GB: One of the things that immediately comes to mind, and many of my interlocutors were directly involved with, is the nurses' movement–the unionization and self-organization of the nurses.There is a movement called Be Like Nina, referring to one of the nurses seen as a pioneer of resisting exploitation. And, of course, under the conditions of war, the labor of nurses is incredibly valuable and needed, but not always appropriately compensated. This is what we can call essential labor, especially when we talk about the front lines, where people are wounded.Many of them are wounded very badly on a daily basis. However, there are other things that are happening in the background as well. While a lot of the resources are pulled to the front, there are people who are experiencing regular daily struggles with their health. And the nurses are being stretched very thin.And this was something that was really amazing to me. This was really one of the very few instances where I saw academics who are leftist feminists actually touching the ground with their ideas: where they got involved with helping the nurses organize, but not taking the center stage, where they acted as support, as a resource, but not overtaking the movement, rather creating the conditions under which nurses themselves could articulate what it was that they needed, what their goals were.And that was incredibly impressive to me because healthcare is severely underfunded across the whole region, and to achieve such tangible goals as wage increases and regulations that empower nurses to do their job was truly impressive. With every conversation with a woman—because I specifically talk only to women—I just felt sheer amazement, because this is so contrary to so many imaginations of what civil society, self-organization, or networks are like in Eastern Europe.This is so contrary to what some have called ‘uncivil' society. What is happening is really self-organization and civil society at its best, organized by women who are oftentimes stretched very thin, not just at work, but also at home, women whose husbands are potentially on the front lines.So to me, I really cannot think of anything else that, in terms of real life impact and in terms of transforming people's lives, has been grander (I'm going to go for that word) than this.BGG: That's remarkable, and thank you for bringing that. I had very little idea of this progress and this happening.So you use the term civil society, which I think is quite apt, and Western conceptions of civil society in the region that we call Eastern Europe can be highly misguided. Let's just put it like that. I think back to a webinar that the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS) hosted on Ukrainian civil society, democratization, responses to the war, and we have this comparative Ukrainian and Baltic perspective, where we looked at how Ukrainian civil society was responding.We looked at how Baltic civil society was responding, and you're doing something similar in your research here. You're looking at Latvia and Lithuania as two of the other case studies, in addition to Poland, Moldova, and, of course, Ukraine. One thing that I think we can all observe just from watching the news, let alone being in the countries as well, is that civil society across the region has had this really robust response in the last few years.So could you speak a little bit more to that in the comparative cases outside of Ukraine that you're looking at in your research, especially Latvia and Lithuania?GB: For sure. I think that in order to theorize civil society and the region in general, we need better theory than has been used often to talk about civil society at large.Here, for example, I'm thinking about Emily Channel Justice and her work and the way that she articulates the notion of self-organization. The way that she thinks about Ukraine, especially in the context of Maidan. The way that it left a self-organization, but that can be applied also to any form of civil society, regardless of ideology, is really a network of decentralized, self-organized people's groups.If you were to look for some kind of central organizing pattern, or some kind of centralized way of doing things, most likely you're not going to find it because it's based on personal network, connections, and localized issues. And I think that's definitely something that I'm seeing in Ukraine.One of the things that I'm seeing in Lithuania and Latvia is that it's going to differ slightly because there are going to be more central organizing figures. If we talk about organizing support for Ukraine, one of the things that we're going to see is that people are going to point to nationwide initiatives.Right now in Lithuania, there is an initiative called Radarum, which is a play on words, on radar and on darom, which is a Lithuanian word for let's do it. And it's a nationwide initiative to collect funds to purchase drones and anti-drone equipment for Ukraine. And there are particular faces that we associate with this initiative.National television is running ads for it. So there's a little bit more of a centralized sense to it. But once again, I would say that this is the mainstream way of organizing civil society, which, of course, with Westernization, has taken on some of the patterns that are similar to the West.If we look towards the left, we're going to see very much that it is self-organized, small groups of people who take different initiatives, such as raising funds for medical care, such as raising funds for queer people in Ukraine. So the more mainstream we go, the more patterns that are akin to those that we see in the West we're going to see.That is also going to be true in Latvia. The further left we go, the more organic, grassroots, self-organized cells of people we're going to find who participate in smaller, less visible initiatives. So that's probably the best way that I can explain the difference.BGG: Got it. We see this distinction of centralization and decentralization.One could consider these different types of movements organic in their own ways, but different in different ways. When one thinks of leftist organizing, which has a long and rich history, organic is sort of one of the key words.It's perpetual, and these society-wide initiatives, like what's currently going on in Lithuania, that we've seen across other countries over the last few years, are maybe a little bit less frequent and less common. So there's an important distinction there.So I want to pivot to the international dimension of how the Ukrainian leftist feminists are talking, especially with Western counterparts. And by Western, we mean Western Europe. We mean American and Canadian. We mean Western, as in not Eastern Europe. So could you talk a little bit about the challenges they're facing there?I think I alluded to it earlier, and you alluded to it earlier, but could you dive a little bit more into that discourse, that dialogue between the Ukrainians and their counterparts?GB: This is the main point of contention. What does it mean to be leftist? How much does local experience shape being leftist?What is the relationship of the left to the national question? And I think this is where we are seeing the real tension. Underlying this tension, of course, is the question of Russia. Let me try to unpack this. And I'm going to start from the other end than I listed, which is with the question of Russia.Eastern European in general, and Ukrainian in particular, leftist feminists have a very different understanding as to what Russia is in terms of geopolitics than the Western counterparts are going to have. This stems from very different histories. Western leftism—especially the new wave of leftism that arose in the sixties and the seventies—in many ways has redefined itself not just through the questions of class, which I would argue were lost to some extent. They lost their centrality.And they redefined themselves through the anti-colonial, anti-racist struggle. And that struggle was particularly important because after the fall of the formal colonial system, the colonial patterns of economic exploitation, of social exploitation, of brain drain still very much persisted. And naming that and defining themselves against Western neoimperialism or neocolonialism in the Global South was one of the most defining features of the Left, both in the Global South and in the West. Now, Russia at that time had positioned itself as the ally of the colonized countries. And some of it was pure show, and some of it was actual money, resources, and help that were sent, for example, to Angola. And that made a real difference. Whether that was genuine concern for the colonized people or whether that was an ideological tool is a matter of debate.Whatever it was, it had a profound impact on the way that Western leftists relate to Russia. They continue to see Russia out of that tradition, in many ways, as an ally against Western capitalism and imperialism. Their empire, against which they define themselves, continues to be in the West, and oftentimes is seen as centered on the United States.The empire against which we define ourselves in Eastern Europe is Russia, because Russia was the colonizing power in a very real sense in the region. It was our empire that subjugated us. It was the colonial power that engaged in just about every single practice in which any colonial power engages in the region.For us, if we think outside of ourselves, Russia continues to be the colonial power in the way that it relates to Central Asia, in the way that it relates to the indigenous people of Siberia, in the way that it continues to conduct business. So both the left in the West and the left in the East continue to define themselves against the empire, but disagree on who the empire is.The fundamental difference is the question of Russia. Because of the way that Western leftists, and particularly Western leftist feminists, have been taught to see the world, the way that they have been habituated to see the world, they're unable to see Russia as an aggressor. They're unable to change their narrative about how NATO might act.And of course, the criticisms of continued Western abuses of power, especially when they center on the United States—such as Afghanistan or such as Iraq, but also here in the European context, intra-European context, Serbia is another context in which that comes up—are highly debatable questions, but they're seen a certain way. They're understood in a certain way by Western leftists. And because of Russia's criticism of the West, Western leftists see it as a natural ally, or at least as an equally guilty party.BGG: That's a really great explanation. I think the way that you've laid that out makes a lot of sense.It also harkens back to where I want to bring this, which is the debate that has been going on in Baltic studies and other academic fields, especially those focusing on the region, about thinking about Baltic history in particular as a colonial history and thinking about what it means to decolonize Baltic studies as a field, to decolonize our academic thinking. There have been a lot of discussions.I know that we were in the same room at the AABS panel at Yale last year on that fantastic panel about decolonization. Where do you think this leads with regard to your research specifically? There's already this trend in this field. I get the sense that you are an advocate and moving forward in land seeking for the field as a whole to move in that direction.What do you think the next steps are? What paths do you think could be taken? What do people need to be thinking about that they may not already be thinking about?GB: Well, I think for me, the key question when we are talking about Baltic studies and decolonization is what is it that we talk about when we talk about decolonizing Baltic studies or Baltic countries?Because I think sometimes we're talking about four different things. We are talking about the question of colonialism and coloniality. That's one. We are talking about imperialism, Russian imperialism, and Russian imperiality. We are talking about Russification and what it means to de-Russify. And we are also talking about Sovietization and what it means to de-Sovietize.And I would argue that while these four concepts are very much interrelated, they have very different agendas. So, I think it's a question of definitions. How do we define what our agenda is? Which of the four do we have in mind when we talk about decolonizing Baltic countries, Baltic studies, or anything else?And I would say that each of the four has its place and is significant. But the flip side of that, especially if we stay with the question of decolonization, is the question of Western theory, practice, and scholarship as it relates to Baltic studies. Because if we go back to the early questions in the conversation of what is civil society and whether there is a civil society, Baltic countries and the region as a whole are pathologized.Because the concept of what civil society is, or is not, was based on Western understandings and Western practices. And it rendered civil society in the region invisible. In what ways does the production of scholarship and knowledge about the region continue to be based in very unequal power relationships, in such a way that it continues to pathologize the region?And these are very uncomfortable questions, because much like, you know, in the late eighteenth century when the Lithuanian Polish Commonwealth was divided between the three powers, we're facing the same question: Who is our ally? Because we have learned that Russia is definitely not, but the West is also a problematic ally.This is where I think the question of what it means to center the study of the region in the theory, in the practice, in the questions that actually originate from the ground up, rather than are solely important. And I'm not ditching all Western scholarship out the window. That would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.But I'm saying, what does it mean to balance? What does it mean to center? What does it mean to change the parameters of the conversation?BGG: Those are some weighty questions. I think they're good questions that the field is, I would say not even starting to engage with, but is engaging with, which is really excellent, but it's a long path.As anyone who is a scholar of decolonization will tell you, it doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen over a decade. It's sort of a continuous process. So, I think that is where we're going to have to leave it, knowing that there is so much more we could have talked about. But, Gražina, thank you so much.This has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you for joining Baltic Ways.GB: Thank you so much for having me, Ben. It's been a privilege.To ensure you catch the next episode of Baltic Ways, make sure you're subscribed to your podcast feed or wherever you get your shows. Thanks so much, and we'll see you next time.(Image: Facebook | Феміністична майстерня)Baltic Ways is a podcast from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fpribalticinitiative.substack.com

Lester Kiewit speaks to Michael Walsh, the Non-Resident Senior Fellow in the Africa Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, about the latest development in already-frosty diplomacy between South Africa and the U.S. Trump has now said he will not attend the G20 meeting in South Africa because of this country’s land policies and what he called the killing of white farmers.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Trump administration has announced exemptions to the massive reciprocal tariffs on China for smartphones, computers and other electronics. In his latest rapid reaction podcast, Darren assesses the exemptions and comments on the the larger tariff picture, barely 10 days after "Liberation Day".  Australia in the World is written, hosted, and produced by Darren Lim, with research and editing this episode by Hannah Nelson and theme music composed by Rory Stenning. Relevant links Tanner Greer, "Obscurity by design: Competing priorities for America's China Policy", Foreign Policy Research Institute, March 2025: https://www.fpri.org/article/2025/03/obscurity-by-design/ Adam Tooze, Chartbook 374: As Trump triggers "sell America", will the result be "stage 4", the politicization of financial markets?, 12 April 2025: https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-374-as-trump-triggers-sell 

Host Ruben Navarrette interviews his old friend and former Harvard classmate, Dr. Ronald J. Granieri who is a history professor at the United States Army War College, as well as a Templeton Education Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Given that Dr. Granieri's speciality is European history, with an emphasis on the study of allies and adversaries, the conversation could not be better timed. The two old friends talk about America's place in the world, and the changes in the U.S.-E.U. partnership in the era of President Trump. They also discuss Russia and Ukraine, trade and tariffs, immigration and global economics. 

This week on Chain Reaction, we feature an installment of the Baltic Ways podcast. Host Indra Ekmanis welcomes back professors Margarita Šešelgytė (Vilnius University), Daunis Auers (University of Latvia), and Andres Kasekamp (University of Toronto) for a roundtable discussion on the first two months of Donald Trump's second term and the US administration's impact on the Baltic countries and broader Europe. This episode was recorded on March 14, 2025.You May Be Interested InBaltic Roundup | March 2025 A look back on the month's major political, cultural, and economic events in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.Explore more from FPRI's Baltic Initiative here. Baltic Ways is a podcast from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI. Get full access to FPRI Insights at fpriinsights.substack.com/subscribe

The UK is in a dark place, but surely it couldn't reach the point of civil war? Don't be so sure. To discuss the possibility of a looming conflict, Will is joined by David Betz. David is Professor of War in the Modern World at King's College London and a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.Read The Spectator Australia here.

The Baltic Ways podcast welcomes back professors Margarita Šešelgytė (Vilnius University), Daunis Auers (University of Latvia), and Andres Kasekamp (University of Toronto) for a roundtable discussion on the first two months of Donald Trump's second term and the US administration's impact on the Baltic countries and broader Europe. This episode was recorded on March 14, 2025.“It's a bit of a shock therapy…and we have to reconsider who we are security-wise in this different situation.” -Margarita ŠešelgytėBaltic Ways is a podcast from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fpribalticinitiative.substack.com

For our fourth episode of "History and our Current World," Kelly welcomes author Jason Steinhauer to explore how social media has impacted historical narratives. They dive into the idea of "e-History" and how social media has made it harder for professional historians to cut through the noise in an age where misinformation is constantly competing for our attention. Jason formerly served as Founding Director of the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest; as a Global Fellow at The Wilson Center and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute; and an adjunct professor at the Maxwell School for Citizenship & Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He worked for seven years at the U.S. Library of Congress. Jason's bestselling book, History, Disrupted: How Social Media & the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past, examines how social media shapes what we know about the past. His Substack newsletter is read in 49 states and 108 countries by policymakers, diplomats, scholars, and citizens. He is the founder and CEO of the History Communication Institute, which comprises 150 scholars and practitioners on 6 continents. Link to History, Disrupted: https://www.amazon.com/History_-Disrupted_-How-Social-Media-and-the-World-Wide-Web-Have-Changed-the-Past/dp/3030851168 The opinions expressed in this conversation are strictly those of the participants and do not represent the views of Georgetown University or any government entity. Produced by Theo Malhotra and Freddie Mallinson.  Recorded on March 6, 2025. Diplomatic Immunity, a podcast from the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, brings you frank and candid conversations with experts on the issues facing diplomats and national security decision-makers around the world. Funding support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. For more, visit our website, and follow us on Linkedin, Twitter @GUDiplomacy, and Instagram @isd.georgetown

Since restoring their independence, the Baltic states have focused on pursuing historical justice related to Soviet crimes, which included widespread repressions and mass deportations. Under the influence of international actors, the Baltic states have also engaged in political processes associated with Holocaust justice. Political scientist Dovilė Budrytė and anthropologist Neringa Klumbytė explain how their interdisciplinary approach has revealed new findings, exposed gaps in existing scholarship, and may influence policy in years to come.Ben Gardner-Gill is the Assistant Director for Outreach and Engagement for the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies and Co-Host of Baltic Ways.Dovilė Budrytė is professor of political science at Georgia Gwinnett College.Neringa Klumbytė is professor of anthropology and Russian and post-Soviet studies, and director of the Lithuania Program at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, Miami University.Baltic Ways is a podcast from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fpribalticinitiative.substack.com

Canada's economy is in the toilet, has an electorate that is overwhelmingly left wing, and a healthcare system that encourages physician assisted suicide over basic treatment. Canada's systemic problems have meant that Canadian voters were slowly starting to wake up, and were on track to deliver a blow-out for the conservative party in the next elections. But while Trump's tariff threats have been omnipresent, his threat to make Canada the “51st state” rallied Canadians around the flag and around the governing Liberal Party. How has Trump's rhetoric hurt conservative chances of victory? And why would Canada make a terrible 51st state? Colin Dueck is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and has served as a foreign policy adviser on several Republican presidential campaigns. Colin is the author of four books on American foreign policy and national security and the AEI report True North: Canadian Politics, the Tory Alternative, and the United States.Read the transcript here. Subscribe to our Substack here.

The jailed founder and leader of the PKK calls on the Kurdish group to disband. That follows four decades of fighting with Turkiye, costing forty thousand lives. So why is this coming now, and what impact could it have on Turkiye and the region? In this episode: Omer Ozkizilcik, Director of Turkish Studies at the Omran Center for Strategic Studies. H. A. Hellyer, Senior Fellow in Geopolitics, International Security and Middle East Studies at the Royal United Services Institute. Mohammed Salih, Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Host: Nick Clark Connect with us:@AJEPodcasts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook At Al Jazeera Podcasts, we want to hear from you, our listeners. So, please head to https://www.aljazeera.com/survey and tell us your thoughts about this show and other Al Jazeera podcasts. It only takes a few minutes!

The free world is reeling and Putin is jubilant as Trump goes over the heads of Ukraine and Europe to “negotiate” directly with Russia – cutting Zelenskyy and European leaders out of talks in Saudi Arabia. Will the two autocrats simply carve Ukraine up between them? Will they heed Zelenskyy's demand that there be no settlement without Ukraine's participation? And given Russia's record of deception, is the notion of a fair and lasting peace just a naive fantasy? Oz Katerji hears the reaction to the Riyadh talks from Kyiv with Maria Avdeeva, security expert and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. • This episode of This Is Not A Drill is supported by Incogni, the service that keeps your private information safe, protects you from identity theft and keeps your data from being sold. There's a special offer for This Is Not A Drill listeners – go to Incogni.com/notadrill to get an exclusive 60% off your annual plan. • Support us on Patreon to keep This Is Not A Drill producing thought-provoking podcasts like this. Written and presented by Oz Katerji. Produced by Robin Leeburn. Original theme music by Paul Hartnoll – https://www.orbitalofficial.com. Executive Producer Martin Bojtos. Group Editor Andrew Harrison. This Is Not A Drill is a Podmasters production. www.podmasters.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Foreign Policy Research Institute Chair of Geopolitics Robert Kaplan discusses the first weeks of the second Trump Administration with Bloomberg's Tom Keene and David Gura. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For decades, police, politicians, and community leaders alike covered up what is likely the largest peacetime organized crime spree in British history: The sexual grooming, exploitation, and trafficking of minors by predominantly Pakistani Muslim migrant communities. While new light is now being shed on this scandal by Elon Musk and brave journalists in Britain, there is an untold number of victims who will likely never see proper justice. How did British fixation on community relations lead to the sexual exploitation of minors? And what does the uncovering of this story, and the corruption that allowed it to occur, mean for the rest of the Western world? Dominic Green is a fellow at the Royal Historical Society, a Wall Street Journal contributor, and a Washington Examiner columnist. He was previously a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and editor-in-chief of The Spectator's U.S. edition. Dr. Green is the author of five books about British history and society. Read the transcript here. Subscribe to our Substack here.

Terrorist activity in Central Asia traces its roots back to the Soviet era - but following the collapse of the USSR in the 1990s, suppressed religious movements evolved into underground Islamist networks, fuelling the rise of jihadist groups in the region. Today, Central Asia faces an increasingly complex terrorism landscape. In this episode of the podcast, Lucas Webber speaks to Bruce Pannier, a Central Asia Fellow at the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a veteran journalist covering the region. Together, they explore the origins of jihadism in Central Asia, the rise of Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) there, and the potential impact of the Assad government's fall in Syria in 2024 on regional jihadist movements. We also hear about the role the internet has played for terrorist networks there. 

Baltic Ways presents a bonus episode from our partners at the EUROPAST Podcast. The EUROPAST Podcast explores Europe's most pressing challenges of public history, investigating the complex and contested spaces of public memory, memory activism and best practices for engaging the public in a dialogue about the past.In this episode of the EUROPAST Podcast, project researcher Rūta Vyšniauskaitė sat down with Agnieška Avin, a PhD candidate at the Institute of Sociology at the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences. Avin is also an activist for Roma integration, working as an educator at the integrative children's day-care center “Padėk Pritapti.”The episode focuses on Agnieška's engagement in social sciences and interest in the Roma community in Lithuania, their linguistic diversity, and cultural history. It also touches upon the positive developments in the integration of the Roma community in Lithuania as well as the enduring challenges that this community faces, such as society's prejudice and distrust, lack of awareness about the Roma community, and misinformation.The EUROPAST podcast series is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union under the WIDERA programme (EUROPAST project, Grant Agreement No. 101079466). Learn more about the project: www.europast.vu.ltBaltic Ways is a podcast from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fpribalticinitiative.substack.com

In dieser Folge des "Zaren. Daten. Fakten." Podcasts ist der Amerikaner Maximilian Hess, Wissenschaftler am Foreign Policy Research Institute zu Gast und gibt Einblicke in Themen wie die letzten Sanktionen der Biden-Administration und deren Auswirkungen auf die russische Wirtschaft und die Ölpreise, sowie die potenziellen Veränderungen unter der neuen Trump-Regierung. Maximilian Hess teilt zudem seine Einschätzungen zur Abwertung des Rubels, der zukünftigen Wirtschaftspolitik der USA und der Rolle des US-Dollars als Leitwährung. Zum Schluss der Episode gibt er konkrete Prognosen für das Wirtschaftswachstum 2025 in den USA, Deutschland und Russland.

With Trump's inauguration today, are we really about experience a new “golden age” in America? No. Not at least according to the best selling writer Robert D. Kaplan, author of Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis (out next week), who argues that Trump's inaugural ceremony today, attended by fawning Silicon Valley moguls, exemplifies the moneyed “decadence” that often precedes imperial decline. A new book from Kaplan is always a big deal. But in today's Trumpian America, Waste Land seems particularly prescient. The book draws heavily from historians of decline like Oswald Spengler and examines how globalization has split American society into two halves: a cosmopolitan, globally-oriented coastal elite and a poorer, more nationalistic hinterland. He argues that this division has eliminated the political center, burdening every election an existential quality. Despite the book's generally Spenglerian pessimism, Kaplan concluded with a note of hope, suggesting that a rediscovery of classical liberalism – characterized by constant questioning and lack of dogmatism – might help us navigate through today's 21st century Waste Land of anarchic violence. Robert D. Kaplan is the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the bestselling author of twenty-two books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including The Good American, The Revenge of Geography, Asia's Cauldron, Monsoon, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and the U. S. Navy's Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world's “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Robert D. Kaplan discuses his new book "Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis" and how we are in a Global Weimar where the planet is running a strange simulation of the Weimar Republic. The world is becoming more interconnected and claustrophobic as Globalization 2.0 pulls us closer together. All three great powers are in decline, but America has the greatest potential to remake itself, and can see a new burst of dynamism under Trump. Israel stands at the heart of this global geopolitical war. Because of urbanization cities will be the principle world stage going forward where crowds, technology, and history will intersect. Watch on BitChute / Brighteon / Rokfin / Rumble / Substack Geopolitics & Empire · Robert Kaplan: Global Weimar, Waste Land, & a World in Permanent Crisis #507 *Support Geopolitics & Empire! Become a Member https://geopoliticsandempire.substack.com Donate https://geopoliticsandempire.com/donations Consult https://geopoliticsandempire.com/consultation **Visit Our Affiliates & Sponsors! Above Phone https://abovephone.com/?above=geopolitics easyDNS (use code GEOPOLITICS for 15% off!) https://easydns.com Escape The Technocracy course (15% discount using link) https://escapethetechnocracy.com/geopolitics PassVult https://passvult.com Sociatates Civis (CitizenHR, CitizenIT, CitizenPL) https://societates-civis.com Wise Wolf Gold https://www.wolfpack.gold/?ref=geopolitics Websites Website https://robertdkaplan.com Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis https://www.amazon.com/Waste-Land-World-Permanent-Crisis-ebook/dp/B0D2W1B519 Robert D. Kaplan | The Tragedy of 21st Century Geopolitics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdvuDByLmig Robert Kaplan: China Seeks World Island as Middle East Forges New Architecture https://geopoliticsandempire.com/2023/08/20/kaplan-china-world-island-mideast-architecture About Robert D. Kaplan ROBERT D. KAPLAN is the bestselling author of twenty-three books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including Waste Land, The Loom of Time, The Tragic Mind, Adriatic, The Revenge of Geography, Asia's Cauldron, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and the U. S. Navy's Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world's “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” *Podcast intro music is from the song "The Queens Jig" by "Musicke & Mirth" from their album "Music for Two Lyra Viols": http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)

Robert D. Kaplan discuses his new book "Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis" and how we are in a Global Weimar where the planet is running a strange simulation of the Weimar Republic. The world is becoming more interconnected and claustrophobic as Globalization 2.0 pulls us closer together. All three great powers are in decline, but America has the greatest potential to remake itself, and can see a new burst of dynamism under Trump. Israel stands at the heart of this global geopolitical war. Because of urbanization cities will be the principle world stage going forward where crowds, technology, and history will intersect. Watch on BitChute / Brighteon / Rokfin / Rumble / Substack Geopolitics & Empire · Robert Kaplan: Global Weimar, Waste Land, & a World in Permanent Crisis #507 *Support Geopolitics & Empire! Become a Member https://geopoliticsandempire.substack.com Donate https://geopoliticsandempire.com/donations Consult https://geopoliticsandempire.com/consultation **Visit Our Affiliates & Sponsors! Above Phone https://abovephone.com/?above=geopolitics easyDNS (use code GEOPOLITICS for 15% off!) https://easydns.com Escape The Technocracy course (15% discount using link) https://escapethetechnocracy.com/geopolitics PassVult https://passvult.com Sociatates Civis (CitizenHR, CitizenIT, CitizenPL) https://societates-civis.com Wise Wolf Gold https://www.wolfpack.gold/?ref=geopolitics Websites Website https://robertdkaplan.com Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis https://www.amazon.com/Waste-Land-World-Permanent-Crisis-ebook/dp/B0D2W1B519 Robert D. Kaplan | The Tragedy of 21st Century Geopolitics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdvuDByLmig Robert Kaplan: China Seeks World Island as Middle East Forges New Architecture https://geopoliticsandempire.com/2023/08/20/kaplan-china-world-island-mideast-architecture About Robert D. Kaplan ROBERT D. KAPLAN is the bestselling author of twenty-three books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including Waste Land, The Loom of Time, The Tragic Mind, Adriatic, The Revenge of Geography, Asia's Cauldron, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and the U. S. Navy's Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world's “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” *Podcast intro music is from the song "The Queens Jig" by "Musicke & Mirth" from their album "Music for Two Lyra Viols": http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)

As the world begins to think through the implications of a second Trump presidential term, Darren is joined once again by Zack Cooper of the American Enterprise Institute to talk through what we do know, and what we don't, about the coming storm. What was Trump's basic critique of the Biden administration's foreign policy? What are the competing camps on foreign policy inside Trumpworld? And what should Australia do, about AUKUS, the Quad, and the alliance generally? Does Kevin Rudd's position remain tenable? There's a lot to discuss, albeit with the caveat that we do not know much for certain at this point! Australia in the World is written, hosted, and produced by Darren Lim, with research and editing this episode by Walter Colnaghi and theme music composed by Rory Stenning. Relevant links Zack Cooper (bio): https://www.aei.org/profile/zack-cooper/ Zack Cooper, Tides of Fortune: The Rise and Decline of Great Militaries (2025, Yale University Press): https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300268676/tides-of-fortune/ Net Assessment (podcast): https://warontherocks.com/category/podcasts/net-assessment/ Tanner Greer, “The Battle to Shape Trump's China policy”, Foreign Policy Research Institute, 29 October 2024: https://www.fpri.org/article/2024/10/the-battle-to-shape-trumps-china-policy/ Ezra Klein Show (podcast), Vivek Ramaswamy Has a Different Vision for Trumpism From JD Vance, 29 October 2024: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-vivek-ramaswamy.html

Join Robert Chernin and Ericka Redic as they welcome tech journalist, marketer, and global speaker Hillel Fuld and John Sitilides, Principal at Trilogy Advisors and Senior Fellow, National Security Program, at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Robert, Ericka, Hillel and John will discuss the evolving geopolitical landscape in the Middle East, the Israel-Iran conflict, and […]

In this episode Richard Pater speaks with Dr. Joshua Krasna, ahead of the 30th anniversary of Israel – Jordan diplomatic ties. They discuss cooperation in the fields of energy and security whist political relations remain fraught.  They also discuss the ramifications of the ongoing war, its effect on domestic Jordanian politics, Palestinian – Jordanian ties and more. Dr. Krasna served for 30 years as a strategic analyst working for the Israeli government where his main focus was Israel - Jordanian relations. Since leaving government he is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a Research Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Centre in Tel Aviv University. He also teaches at NYU's Centre for Global Affairs.

This week on Baltic Ways - The US election is approaching quickly with implications for America's allies in the world. Professors Margarita Šešelgyte (Vilnius University), Daunis Auers (University of Latvia), and Andres Kasekamp (University of Toronto) join a roundtable discussion on the impact that a Kamala Harris or Donald Trump presidency could have on the security and future outlook of the Baltic countries and broader European, and how people in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are feeling about the state of democracy in the US. This episode was recorded on September 25, 2024.Explore more from FPRI's Baltic Intiative.Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.

Heartland's Tim Benson is joined by Anthony Eames, director of scholarly initiatives at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, non-resident fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and professorial lecturer at the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University, to discuss his new book, A Voice in Their Own Destiny: Reagan, Thatcher, and Public Diplomacy in the Nuclear 1980s. They chat about how the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher used innovations in public diplomacy to build back support for their foreign policy agendas at a moment of widespread popular dissent. They also discuss how ow competition between the governments of Reagan and Thatcher, the Anglo-American antinuclear movement, and the Soviet peace offensive sparked a revolution in public diplomacy.Get the book here: https://www.umasspress.com/9781625347107/a-voice-in-their-own-destiny/

Baltic Ways kicks off a new slate of episodes with an introduction to hosts Dr. Indra Ekmanis and Ben Gardner-Gill, and previews of upcoming topics.Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.TranscriptIndra Ekmanis: Hello, and welcome to Baltic Ways, the podcast bringing you interviews and insights from the world of Baltic Studies. I'm your host, Indra Ekmanis.Ben Gardner-Gill: And I am your co-host, Ben Gardner-Gill. IE: And we are excited to bring you a new slate of podcast episodes this upcoming season. But before we do that, we wanted to take the opportunity to learn a little bit more about each other as co-hosts and give our listeners a chance to hear about our past Baltic Studies and how the podcast came to be.Stay tuned.So then you've been a guest host on Baltic Ways before and in this season, you'll be joining us more regularly as co-host. But I would love it if you could tell us a little bit more about your background and how you came to be involved in Baltic Studies.BGG: Absolutely. I've had a real deep interest in the Baltic region since I first set foot in Estonia in 2016, I was there on an internship at the Museum of Occupations, as it was then called, now Vabamu. I have had an interest in the broader region of Eastern and Central Europe, dating back to high school and before, just because I have some family roots in the region, but not so much from the Baltic region specifically.S o happening upon this internship in Estonia was a great stroke of luck because I got to learn a great deal about the country, its history, its politics, got to engage on subjects which I'm really interested in—20th century history—in particular, memory studies, and political science. And what really was the start of what is now going to be a lifelong interest is meeting people and getting to know Estonian culture a bit and to make Estonian friends. And I've had the great honor of being able to return to Estonia and see some of those people again and stay in touch with others.I've also been to Latvia and Lithuania a couple times. Most recently, last year in 2023 for the Conference on Baltic Studies in Europe, CBSE Acronis. That's where my interest comes from. And Indra, back at you: I know that your roots in the Baltic region go back a little further.IE: Yes. So my interest in Baltics studies is both personal and professional. Um, my father who was from Latvia was a Baltic studies scholar and he was involved in the association for the advancement of Baltic studies. So I grew up sort of immersed in this world. all Of my school projects growing up were certainly related to Latvia or the Baltic states. I remember very clearly a poster on the presidency of Davorko Vidovic de Verga. I remember writing about Latvia's accession to the European Union, to NATO. But it was only really when I started to professionalize my research and scholarship that I suddenly had this realization that, of course I could've gone in any other different academic direction, but I'm glad I stuck with Baltic studies and I ended up at the University of Washington for graduate school. And that is where I really started to narrow my focus. My undergraduate degree was also in global studies, but at the University of Washington, I really started to think about identity formation in the Baltic states, in the diaspora; Russian speaker identity, post-Soviet identity, and the mechanisms of society and government that support that identity formation; and the way that we think about who we are, the languages that we speak, and the nationalities that we perform, depending on context. So, of course this was influenced by my own experiences in Latvia and as a member of the diaspora in the United States. But I was really fortunate to be at the University of Washington, where of course one of my main advisors was Dr. Guntis Šmidchens, who has also long been involved in the Association for the Advancement of Politics Studies. And it was through his encouragement that I became more heavily involved in AABS (Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies) and now including leading the podcast initiative. I think Baltic studies is one of those unique fields where you really benefit from having an interdisciplinary lens. It allows you to connect with colleagues who are looking at similar problems from a different perspective and that's something that I find particularly interesting. And I think it's one of the reasons that Baltic Ways, our podcast, is a really fascinating one because you have many different entry points into the world of Baltic studies, whether you're interested in economics or culture, identity, formation, politics, cybersecurity, or whatever it might be. There are just so many ways to get into Baltic studies, so many ways to be connected to the field. And it's always really interesting to hear about another aspect of the region that maybe doesn't cross your research path on an everyday basis, but maybe has some lessons for the work that you do. So, tell me a little bit more about your involvement with the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies.BGG: I serve as the assistant director for outreach and engagement. It's a part-time position. So I run the association's social media app. I have a hand in web development, the quarterly newsletter, the annual bulletin, which we work on together as well. And I picked up the podcast guest hosting duties, recently, which I was really excited for. Why I particularly was excited to add the podcast to my range of duties was exactly what you just said: It was to provide different entry points for people into Baltic studies. I've spoken with listeners who are coming from really different perspectives. Folks who have a pretty similar background to me, maybe in 20th century history, maybe with an interest in politics, who come in from that angle. I also have turned on a couple of friends to this podcast who have no academic background in Baltic studies. And they find something familiar in some of these episodes because one thing we try to do, and I would dare to say tend to do well, is try to get the meat of the why out of our interviews. Like, okay, what's the sort of critical thing to understand here? Why is this important? Why is this something that people should care about?That's something I really enjoy doing,in the fields that I have a background in, but even more so in disciplines and with experts from fields I don't have a background in. That is something I've really enjoyed and look forward to continuing, this season and maybe beyond.So, Andrea, we've talked a bit about the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, AABS, but the other partner in this podcast is the Foreign Policy Research Institute, FPRI, where you are a fellow. Can you tell us a little bit more about FPRI and how that collaboration was born?IE: Yeah. So FPRI, the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, is a non-partisan, foreign policy think tank. I am a Baltic Sea fellow, in their Baltic initiative, which is under the Eurasia research program. And I actually came to learn about FPRI through an AABS conference where they hosted a luncheon. And after that conference, I began contributing to the Baltic bulletin, which is part of their Baltic initiative. I later became the editor of the Baltic newsletter, which goes out monthly and then the editor of the Baltic bulletin. And it is a really great way to keep in touch with new research and timely topics, primarily around foreign policy in the Baltic Sea region. But as we've talked about, as part of the podcast, there is also the opportunity to think more expansively about Baltic studies in the region. And so when there was interest from AABS to launch Baltic Ways, it seemed like a natural fit and a good opportunity to do so in partnership with FPRI's Baltic initiative, to reach a broad audience of people who are both heavily involved and tangentially interested in the Baltic sea region in a variety of different ways. So to get back to this season, I think we're really excited to continue this collaboration with FPRI, and for you and I, Ben, to start collaborating by sharing these co-hosting duties. We're excited to explore some interesting topics in Baltic studies: some that are very timely and others that are more evergreen. For example, in an upcoming episode, we will talk about the US elections and the impact on the Baltic countries: what either a Kamala Harris or a Donald Trump presidency might look like for Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.BGG: I'm also hoping to speak with some colleagues about decolonization, particularly in the light of the last few years of both public and academic discourse.And we'll also be taking a sort of a European look, at the EU level, with some of the stances of the Baltic states and their positioning. For example, Kayakalas, former prime minister of Estonia, is now going to be the High Representative for foreign affairs, a very senior position in the EU. So what does that mean among other things for the Baltic states?So there's that. There's also more to come, in terms of new scholarship. As you said, we're looking at a range of topics, both in the news and things that are up and coming from the academic space. So, it's gonna be a great mix of topics this year.IE: I'm excited and I'm looking forward to hearing more. And of course we'd love to invite our audience to also send us ideas, topics, or scholars that you'd like to hear on Baltic Ways. BGG: Or if you're a scholar who'd like to be on Baltic Ways also let us know. IE: Yes. Yes. We'd love to chat. Well, thanks so much, Ben, for joining me in this intro, as we jump into a new season of Baltic Ways. BGG: Yes, likewise. IE: Yeah. And thank you to our audience for tuning in. Be sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and we look forward to seeing you for our October episode.  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fpribalticinitiative.substack.com

The Biden administration is looking to hit the brakes on Chinese and Russian technology in U.S. cars. Officials warn the tech can allow vehicles to be remotely controlled, causing safety and privacy concerns.Is a bigger war on the horizon in the Middle East? Israel is striking back at Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Pentagon is deploying troops. A senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute will join us to assess.The man accused of attempting to assassinate former President Trump is being held without bail. We have the latest as more serious charges are expected to come.All or nothing: former President Donald Trump says he won't run again in 2028—if he loses this election. Meanwhile Vice President Kamala Harris reports her single biggest fundraising event yet. The latest from both campaigns.??More Breaking News, Special Reports, and Live Coverage on NTD: https://ept.ms/NTD_LIVE

The Biden administration is looking to hit the brakes on Chinese and Russian technology in U.S. cars. Officials warn the tech can allow vehicles to be remotely controlled, causing safety and privacy concerns. Is a bigger war on the horizon in the Middle East? Israel is striking back at Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Pentagon is deploying troops. A senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute will join us to assess. The man accused of attempting to assassinate former President Trump is being held without bail. We have the latest as more serious charges are expected to come. All or nothing: former President Donald Trump says he won't run again in 2028—if he loses this election. Meanwhile Vice President Kamala Harris reports her single biggest fundraising event yet. The latest from both campaigns. ⭕️ Watch in-depth videos based on Truth & Tradition at Epoch TV

In the midst of ongoing debate regarding the military service record of Democratic party vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, Providence's Marc LiVecche spoke with Marine Corps veterans Mac Owens and Keith Pavlischek to clarify the real issues. Focusing on the charge that Walz placed his own interests over his duty to his men by retiring rather than deploying to Iraq, this conversation attempts to avoid partisan bickering in order to discuss the effect of Walz's decision on unit morale, cohesion, mission effectiveness, loyalty, and, ultimately, honor. Notes: "Tim Walz's Military Service Controversy" Mackubin Ownes, GOLOCALProv.com Mackubin Owens is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He previously served as editor of Orbis: FPRI's Journal of World Affairs (2008-2020). From 2015 until March of 2018, he was Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. From 1987 until 2014, he was Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He is also a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam, where as an infantry platoon and company commander in 1968-1969, he was wounded twice and awarded the Silver Star medal. He is also a contributor to Providence Magazine. Keith Pavlischek, contributing editor, is a military affairs expert with a focus on just war theory and the ethics of war. He retired as a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps in 2007 after thirty years of active and reserve service having served in Desert Storm, Bosnia, Iraq, with the U.S. Central Command, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He is the author of John Courtney Murray and the Dilemma of Religious Toleration (1994) and numerous articles, including a chapter on the ethics of asymmetric warfare in the Ashgate Research Companion to Military Ethics (2015). He is also a contributor to Providence Magazine.

Computer chips are the driving force behind everything from smartphones and cars to military defense systems and artificial intelligence. Not only are they the essential element of modern digital infrastructure, they are a critical element in the global balance of power.Taiwan is home to the most advanced and productive chip plants in the world, precariously placing the technology between Communist China and the democratic West. In today's geopolitical landscape, control over semiconductor supply chains is more than just an economic issue; it's a matter of national security. Today on Political Economy, I'm talking with Chris Miller, author of Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology.Miller is a nonresident senior fellow here at AEI, where his research focuses on Russian foreign policy, politics, economics, as well as Eurasian geopolitics and the geopolitics of technology. He is an assistant professor of international history and co-director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is also the director of the Eurasia program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

In this episode of the ChinaPower Podcast, we are joined by Dr. I-Chung Lai and Professor Jacques deLisle to unpack China's 2005 Anti-Secession Law and its important implications for cross-Strait relations—the topic of an international conference co-hosted by CSIS and Prospect Foundation in early August 2024. Dr. Lai dissects the legislation's nine articles, particularly Article 8's conditions in which China can employ ‘non-peaceful means' toward Taiwan. Professor deLisle speaks to the implications of the recent “22 Opinions” that China released to strengthen the Anti-Secession Law. The 22 Opinions criminalizes support for Taiwan independence and could be even used against foreign individuals who are not from China or Taiwan. However, Professor deLisle suggests that international recognition and enforcement of these laws would raise human rights concerns. Finally, Dr. Lai and Professor deLisle offer their recommendations on how the United States, Taiwan, and the international community can effectively respond to China's actions.  Dr. I-Chung Lai is the president of Prospect Foundation, a Taiwan-based think tank. Prior to joining the Prospect Foundation, he held several prominent positions within the Democratic Progressive Party, serving as executive director of the DPP Mission to the United States and as the director general of the Department of International Affairs. He has also worked as a special assistant with the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Tokyo.  Professor Jacques deLisle is a Stephen A. Cozen professor of law and professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching focus on contemporary Chinese law and politics, including legal reform and its relationship to economic reform and political change in China, the international status of Taiwan and cross-Strait relations, China's engagement with the international order, legal and political issues in Hong Kong under Chinese rule, and U.S.-China relations. DeLisle is the director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China, co-director of the Center for Asian Law, and director of the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.  

Aro Velmet is an associate professor of history at the University of Southern California, where he is a historian of modern Europe, colonialism, science, technology, and medicine with an overarching interest in gender studies. For Baltic Ways, he shares insights into the progression of LGBTQ+ rights in Estonia and the broader region and the path that has led to legislative change over the past decade. Mentioned in this episode:Velmet, A. (2019). Sovereignty after Gender Trouble: Language, Reproduction, and Supranationalism in Estonia, 1980–2017. Journal of the History of Ideas 80(3), 455-478. Põldsam, Rebeka, et al. Kalevi Alt Välja: LGBT+ Inimeste Lugusid 19. Ja 20. Sajandi Eestist. Eesti LGBT Ühing : Rahva Raamat, 2023.Elisarion: Elisàr von Kupffer and Jaanus Samma at the Kumu Art Museum in TallinnIrina Roldugina, UCIS Postdoctoral Fellow, History, Slavic Languages and LiteratureTranscriptIndra Ekmanis: Hello, and welcome to Baltic Ways, a podcast bringing you interviews and insights from the world of Baltic studies. I'm your host Indra Ekmanis. Aro Velmet is an associate professor of history at the University of Southern California where he is a historian of modern Europe, colonialism, science, technology, and medicine, with an overarching interest in gender studies. Today in our conversation, we speak about recent changes to LGBTQ-plus issues in Estonia and the broader region and the path that has led to where we are today. Stay tuned. Dr. Aro Velmet, thank you so much for joining us on Baltic Ways. Your research interests are pretty varied, right? They stretch across the globe to look at how microbiology became a tool of French colonial governance, all the way to the history of digital statecraft in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Estonia and in the global south. But today our conversation is going to focus a little bit on your work on gender and the current state of LGBTQ rights in the Baltic states. But before we get there, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your academic interests?Aro Velmet: Well, thank you, Indra, for inviting me to the show. I am, as you said, primarily a historian of science and technology, and I'm interested in the ways that various kinds of experts make claims on politics and power: how they reformulate questions that we think of as essentially questions of politics—who gets to cross borders, who gets to have various kinds of rights—as questions of technological expertise.So this may mean formulating public health policy, right? If the pandemic breaks out, then who needs to be vaccinated? What kinds of populations need to be surveilled, monitored, and regulated? This is what the first decade of my academic career was dedicated to in the context of the French Empire. Or it may mean questions around gender and reproduction. It may mean questions around how democracy is conducted, which is sort of what I'm researching right now. But I guess at the heart of it really is this question, and really this kind of utopian vision, of using technological expertise to solve these political quagmires, these debates that Western societies have been wrestling with for well over a century, that lots of different scientists have had the idea that maybe the way to break these problems open is through the application of this or that novel technology. So that's kind of what I'm broadly interested in academically. IE: Thank you for sharing that is really interesting. I'm sure that there are many, many different ways you can take that too—a lot of those questions resonate in today's world. Well, returning to the subject at hand today: In the past year or so, we've had some significant legislative steps happen in the Baltic states around LGBTQ-plus rights, particularly in Estonia and Latvia. Estonia adopted a marriage equality bill. In Latvia, civil unions are legal as of July 1st this year. Efforts in Lithuania to recognize same-sex partnerships, however, were also kind of in the legislative mix, but ended up stalling. I wonder if you can give us some insights into where the Baltic states currently stand with regard to LGBTQ rights and, more of some of the historical context of those rights in the region.AV: So I should preface this by saying that I really am not an expert on the histories of Latvia and Lithuania, even though the three Baltic states get lumped into one category very often. They are quite different, particularly in this question of LGBTQ rights.IE: That's fair.AV: To start off, I think the one bit of historical context that is really important is just how rapid and dramatic the shift in public attitudes and the legal situation towards LGBTQ people has been all over the Baltics, and I can speak for Estonia, specifically. And just to give you some idea of that, in 2012—this is a couple of years before same-sex civil unions were legalized—popular support for marriage equality in Estonia stood at roughly about a third of the population. So it was a sort of minority position. And we've now, over the course of twelve years, come to a point where not just marriage equality is now legal, has been legal for just about a year, and it also enjoys growing popular support. It now has majority support and had majority support in 2023 when it was legalized in parliament. So the shift really has been quite dramatic; that's kind of one thing to keep in mind. And I sort of remember when I first started getting involved with this question in 2011, it really was the kind of topic that no mainstream publication, no mainstream politician wanted to touch with a ten-foot pole. We tried to poll legislators, at the time, on their opinion about same-sex marriage or same-sex civil partnerships. And the vast majority of legislators declined to answer the question; they just didn't want themselves to be associated with this. So this situation is now quite dramatically different. The other thing that I already alluded to is that the situation is quite different in different Baltic countries. So while Estonia now has broad majority support to same-sex marriage and overwhelming support, over 70 percent, to same-sex civil partnerships and kind of broad question of do you think homosexuality is acceptable, these numbers are quite different in the Baltic states.So the kind of contrast to this is Lithuania, where a recent survey showed that only barely a quarter of the population supports same-sex marriage: so dramatically different contexts. And to a degree, these are contexts that are explained by history, culture, and politics, right? Lithuania is a strongly Catholic country, and the kind of Catholic discourse that is global and particularly prominent in Poland, but also in other Catholic countries such as France, that really sees homosexuality as a sin and same-sex marriage as an affront to church doctrine, is really something that dominates in Lithuania.I think the situation in Latvia is a bit more complicated, and you probably can tell me more about this than I can tell you. But it seems to me that a lot of that discourse has to do with Russian-oriented political parties and the discourse that is connected to the Kremlin's official position on gay rights and the preservation of so-called traditional marriage.So there's lots of context here that makes these three countries in some ways quite different, but I think they are also similar in that the broad sort of direction of travel over the past two decades has been towards increasing acceptance of the LGBTQ community and increasing moves towards legislation that protects the rights of gay and queer people around the three Baltics states.IE: Thank you for sharing that background. I'm no expert on the situation in Latvia, but it's quite interesting. Edgars Rinkēvičs, the current president, is the first gay head of state in Europe. At the same time, you're right that the discourse is quite difficult and legislatures have taken quite a long time to implement some rulings from the Supreme Court, which has urged them to take steps towards approving civil unions and same-sex partnerships for a while. It's quite a mixed bag. You mentioned the situation in Lithuania and the kind of deep ties to Catholicism and faith. That's something that, I think often, is thought of when we think of resistance to LGBT rights. But you also wrote an article in 2019, called “Sovereignty After Gender Trouble,” where you look at, more specifically, Estonia, which is not really a particularly religious society in the same sort of way. And you look at how the opposition to LGBT rights drew arguments more broadly linking them to demography, state sovereignty, language, resistance to that kind of supranational authority: in this case, it was the European Union. And certainly, demography and language in the Baltic states are quite existential hot topics.So I would love it if you could tell us a little bit more about that research. I found that article really interesting.AV: I think the research was basically spurred by this question of why is this attack on what certain conservative groups called gender ideology—and we can characterize this as a sort of broadly homophobic sentiment—so popular? Not just in Estonia, but in a variety of different places where it seems that just saying that this is a movement that's grounded in religious sentiment doesn't quite explain its broad popularity among many different social groups. And it is true, it is true also in the Estonian case, that a lot of the leading activists of the so-called anti-gender movement, come from religious backgrounds. So in the case of Estonia, they are fundamentalist Catholics. This is particularly puzzling because Catholicism in Estonia is sort of small—there are very few people who are Catholics. Estonia in general is one of the least religious countries in the world. And yet at the same time, this movement gained a lot of traction in the 2010s during this debate over same-sex civil unions.Now, basically what I found in my research when I looked at the kinds of arguments that these anti-gender activists and conservative politicians were making, their arguments weren't really about religion. They weren't really about something like natural law—something that's often invoked in Catholic discussions.But they were really about a question of sovereignty. And the way this argument was made was roughly, like this: The symbol of health for the Estonian state is population growth, right? When the population is growing, then the state is healthy. When the population is declining, then this means that Estonian sovereignty is under attack.And we see this in the Soviet period when mass migration of Russophone citizens threatened the Estonian demographic situation in the 1980s. This is how this argument is made. AV: And we're seeing this in the 2000s where the Estonian population, the kind of natural birth rate is declining. And what this must mean is that Estonian sovereignty is under threat by this different supranational organization, the European Union. The links that these groups draw between the European Union and the Soviet Union are in some cases, very direct. There are cartoons where you have a kind of fat cat Estonian politician bowing toward Moscow in 1988 and then toward Brussels in 2014. And the problem with these kinds of supranational organizations is that they are out of touch with the will of the people. They're out of touch with what people consider to be a healthy way of living, and this is expressed through these programs supporting LGBT rights.So really I think that this tells us quite a bit about what draws the sort of broader population to this kind of rhetoric. It's not really Christian rhetoric, which is quite downplayed, about sinfulness and natural law and righteous living and things like that. It's really a language about giving away power to supranational entities. And in this telling, the support of the political class, of Estonian liberals and social democrats, towards LGBT rights then becomes a kind of proxy for saying, “Look, these are people whose interests lie with Brussels and not with the people in Tallinn or in Paide or in Kohtla Järve or in these small towns that are being forgotten.”And I think actually that move—where gay rights become a stand-in for a kind of liberal alienation and a representation of a loss of sovereignty to supranational institutions—is actually quite revealing because I think that is broadly the same kind of argumentation that is being put forth in Poland by the Law and Justice Party, by Viktor Orban's Fidesz, with a sort of heavy dollop of anti-Semitism thrown in for good measure, and by the Rassemblement National in France as well. And by peeling away the religious layers of this rhetoric, we really get to what is at the heart of the matter.IE: Yeah. Maybe the supranational part is also perhaps not as intensive in the United States, but the idea of the kind of alienation, especially of the rural population and the areas that are underserved, and homosexuality as a kind of stand-in there for politicians is—I think it's instructive also there. As you noted, this article focuses on the backlash to the European Union's more progressive stance. You know, you mentioned Poland and Hungary—these are also the close neighbors of the Baltic states in some ways. But on the other side, you have Finland, Sweden, and Northern Europe—decidedly more progressive in their stances. So I wonder if you could perhaps tell us a little bit about how the international community—be it organizations or be it close neighbors or even further neighbors—have influenced the trajectory for the Baltic states on these questions.AV: Yeah, of course. It's interesting that you bring up the Nordics because I think something that has made a very substantial difference in Estonia's trajectory compared to Latvia and Lithuania is the very close economic and cultural ties to Sweden and Finland and Norway as well. And therefore they were able to benefit from many of the resources of these countries and in ways that are quite material. So Norway's gender equality fund, for instance, has financed a lot of Estonian NGOs, and had for a long time financed the office of gender equality at the Ministry of Social Affairs. Lots of activists, who've been working at this in Estonia for a long time, have either family in Finland or Sweden or hail from there, or sort of Estonian Swedes or something like that, and generally the sort of links and networks with Nordic organizations have been very tight. And so there's always been a lot of people who are willing to do advocacy work in Estonia when in moments where local politicians have not been willing to speak up for gay rights it has been quite easy to get someone like Alexander Stubb, the current Finnish president, to give an interview on the issue, you know, way back in 2011. So I think that has made quite a big difference. I mean, this, in some ways, also opens up the local community to the criticism that they're astroturfing, right: that these organizations are EU-funded organizations that, again, are somehow alienated from the rest of the population. I just want to make very, very clear that this is a very misleading argument. Because it hasn't been for a lack of wanting or a lack of initiative that these organizations have evolved over the time that they have. It's been primarily due to a lack of funding. It's been due to the fact that there simply haven't been funding sources for people to build these organizations within Estonia. So they've gone to supranational organizations like the EU, like the Soros Foundation or various Nordic sources of funding to do it. IE: Maybe we can continue on—because I think we're already on this path—that you can tell us a little bit more about local activism, local organizations, and how that's impacting both the political side legislation but also the social side. That's quite a dramatic statistic that you cited for Estonia, right? In just a handful of years moving general acceptance of same-sex marriage.AV: So the support for same-sex marriage right now is just over half of the population. And you can break this down demographically and see some interesting things there. The below-25-year-olds overwhelmingly support it. Russian-language speakers tend to be more skeptical, but they are, the growth has been, perhaps the fastest over the past couple of years. So yeah, the changes have been quite dramatic. And thinking about the organization and the kind of activists seen in Estonia, some things appear quite different if you look at it, particularly from an Anglophone or an American's perspective, which is that, by and large, organizations in Estonia tend to be more oriented towards either internal community building or kind of professional policy work. Really sort of working together with the Minister of Social Affairs with legislators in the parties who are broadly favorable to LGBT rights, with various ministries and state organizations, rather than having a kind of strong on the streets presence, right? This putting bodies on the streets and really pushing in that form hasn't been a particularly big part of political activism and certainly not in Estonia. I know less about Latvia and Lithuania. And in some sense this has been, I think, both a positive and a negative aspect. Certainly, we've seen how quickly and well conservative organizations have organized, precisely around big public meetings and building a kind of mass base of support for their agenda. And this certainly made the fights in 2014, and to a lesser extent last year, quite complicated. The other thing I think that's worth mentioning, that some researchers like Pauliina Lukinmaa have pointed out, is that the LGBTQ community and the organizations in particular tend to be quite divided along ethnic lines, right? There are many different communities that for a long time didn't really talk to one another and have had very different experiences. In Estonia this has been compounded by the arrival of folks who are fleeing persecution in Russia and also Ukrainian LGBTQ people who have arrived in Estonia with the ongoing war in the past two years. So thinking about how to bring these communities together has generally been one of the challenging aspects. Again, I'm relying here on research that I've read, more than direct experience. IE: Yeah, that is interesting to see how those cleavages also carry over into this type of work and activism. I wonder, what do you see as the future for LGBT rights in the Baltic states? Do you see this growing convergence, this very rapid kind of shift that you've already pointed to continuing and will convergence with Northern Europe may be on the horizon? Is it tangible?AV: Yeah, I think it depends a lot on political contingency. One thing to keep in mind is that, for instance, both the same-sex civil partnership law that was passed in Estonia in 2014, and the marriage equality law that was passed in 2023—these were not foregone conclusions. These were narrow votes, products of a lot of lobbying that could have gone in a different direction had a few things here and there been different. So they were really kind of utilizing the opportunity handed in a moment. And we need to keep this in mind, right? I think the Baltics are broadly in a similar situation all around where small shifts in the political makeup of the country can dramatically change the situation on rights. I think one of the challenges that all three countries will face, and certainly Estonia is seeing this unfold right now, is that generally, the parties that have most steadfastly supported queer rights have been liberal parties in the sense of being sort of broadly on the right, economically speaking. So the Reform Party in Estonia—that's the current prime minister's party—at a certain point, can only go so far in that direction, right? And already after the last elections, we saw quite a bit of debate over whether the winning of marriage equality was really—well, let me think of how to sort of put this, in the best way. That there's a trade-off if you sacrifice, for instance, progressive healthcare policy or progressive taxation policy for something like marriage equality. Because, of course, queer people also need healthcare. In fact, they are more likely to require healthcare. They are more likely to be vulnerable to social dislocation. They are more likely to need government services. They are more likely to experience workplace discrimination. So, they also need stronger labor protections. So, this question of how much do you want to hitch your ride to the liberal bandwagon is one that I think is going to become increasingly acute now that these basic questions of civil rights have been more or less settled. I don't think these are going to be turned back.But now we're starting to see that actually the experience of middle-class queer people in Tallinn can be quite different from poor queer people in the countryside. We are starting to think more about what is the difference between the experience of queer people who speak Estonian versus those who speak Russian. And I think figuring this out is going to be quite the challenge because there is not nearly as much consensus on issues of social policy than there is emerging on this sort of broader question of civil rights. IE: Yeah, that's a really good point to make. Thank you for highlighting it. Well, we're nearing the end of our time, but I want to ask you to tell us a little bit about what you are currently working on and if you have any recommended reading for listeners.AV: Sure, the answer to the first question is going to take us quite far from this conversation since gender and gender studies are a part of all of my research. You know, it's a fundamental part of the human condition, so anything one studies, I think, should have a gender component to it, but it's not the primary topic of my research right now. I'm interested in the history of information processing and governance and the idea of solving politics through computers. I'm following the story from the 1960s and the foundation of various institutes of cybernetics in places like Tallinn, Kyiv, Vilnius, and elsewhere, to the story of the Estonian digital state that emerged in the 1990s and is still kind of the main branding exercise. IE: E-stonia.AV: Yeah, E-stonia, exactly. The digital republic. And, you know, it's still asking questions about the relationship of expertise to power. The way people imagine political communities and the way people imagine bodies. So it carries many of the themes of the stuff that I've researched before, but taking it a little bit closer to the Baltic states.And then as for reading recommendations, I really would love for people to engage with the work of Irina Roldugina, who is, I think, currently at the University of Pittsburgh. She's a fantastic scholar of Soviet social queer history, really a kind of queer history written from the bottom up. And it's this really phenomenal reading. She's found archives that are just astounding in what they reveal, but also in how difficult it is to really discover queer voices in the archive, which have tended to marginalize them throughout the 20th century. Folks who read Estonian, I really would like to recommend the collected volume titled Kalevi Alt Välja, which is edited by my friend and colleague Uku Lember and Rebeka Põldsam and Andreas Kalkun, which chronicles again, sort of, bottom-up queer histories in Estonia from the 19th century to the present. And I think it'd be a very nice companion to this exhibit on queer Balto-German art that's right now running at the National Art Museum in Tallinn. So, also really, really interesting stuff—again, uncovering a part of Baltic queer history that I had no idea about, personally. And it's great art to boot. So yes, lots of good stuff out there. IE: Those are excellent recommendations. We'll be sure to link them in the bottom of our podcast notes. And I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us, for sharing your perspective on your vast array of research topics, and for honing in on this subject with us this time. But perhaps we'll have to speak again on some of your other work. So I just want to thank you. Thank you so much.AV: I would be happy to talk more. Thank you for inviting me. IE: Thank you for tuning into Baltic Ways, a podcast from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. A note that the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI. I'm your host Indra Ekmanis. Subscribe to our newsletters at aabs-balticstudies.org and FPRI.org/baltic-initiative for more from the world of Baltic studies. Thanks for listening and see you next time. Image: Facebook | Baltic Pride This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fpribalticinitiative.substack.com

Batu Kutelia has over a decade of experience in international relations, and currently serves as a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is a former Ambassador to the USA and former Head of Georgia's Foreign Intelligence Service. He is a member of the board at the Atlantic Council of Georgia and Professor at the Alte University, Tbilisi, Georgia. He was co-author and TV co-host of the Foreign Affairs talk show at the Mtavari TV in 2020-2021. He is frequent contributor to the major national and international TV, printed and online media on the issues of national and international security, Russian hybrid warfare, defense and security sector reform and policies. ---------- LINKS: https://x.com/bkutelia https://www.linkedin.com/in/batu-kutelia-95733584/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batu_Kutelia https://www.fpri.org/contributor/batu-kutelia/ https://www.mccaininstitute.org/programs/leadership-programs/mccain-global-leaders/ngl/batu-kutelia/ https://cepa.org/author/batu-kutelia/ ---------- ARTICLES: https://kyivindependent.com/author/batu-kutelia/ https://kyivindependent.com/kutelia-sikharulidze-ending-putins-wars-dont-forget-georgia/ https://warontherocks.com/2024/05/rewind-and-reconnoiter-americas-vital-interests-in-georgia-with-batu-kutelia-shota-gvineria-and-david-h-ucko/ https://cepa.org/article/georgia-first-victim-of-russias-war-on-democracy/ https://ip-quarterly.com/en/georgias-fate-will-be-decided-kyiv https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/opinion/russias-inevitable-collapse/ https://www.fpri.org/article/2020/10/georgias-parliamentary-elections-and-the-problem-of-oligarchic-rule/ https://www.the-american-interest.com/2020/01/31/state-capture-in-the-caucasus/ ---------- SUPPORT THE CHANNEL: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/siliconcurtain https://www.patreon.com/siliconcurtain ---------- TRUSTED CHARITIES ON THE GROUND: kharpp - Reconstruction project supporting communities in Kharkiv and Przemyśl https://kharpp.com/ Save Ukraine https://www.saveukraineua.org/ Superhumans - Hospital for war traumas https://superhumans.com/en/ UNBROKEN - Treatment. Prosthesis. Rehabilitation for Ukrainians in Ukraine https://unbroken.org.ua/ Come Back Alive https://savelife.in.ua/en/ Chefs For Ukraine - World Central Kitchen https://wck.org/relief/activation-chefs-for-ukraine Ukrainian Freedom News https://www.ukrainianfreedomnews.com/donation/ UNITED24 - An initiative of President Zelenskyy https://u24.gov.ua/ Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation https://prytulafoundation.org NGO “Herojam Slava” https://heroiamslava.org/ NOR DOG Animal Rescue https://www.nor-dog.org/home/ ---------- PLATFORMS: Twitter: https://twitter.com/CurtainSilicon Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/siliconcurtain/ Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/4thRZj6NO7y93zG11JMtqm Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finkjonathan/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/siliconcurtain ---------- Welcome to the Silicon Curtain podcast. Please like and subscribe if you like the content we produce. It will really help to increase the popularity of our content in YouTube's algorithm. Our material is now being made available

What did commemoration of the dead look like in Medieval Livonia and how did memoria shape group identities in the region? Dr. Gustavs Strenga shares insights into his research and parallels with modern-day memory wars. Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.Explore more from the Baltic Intiative here. 

What did commemoration of the dead look like in Medieval Livonia and how did memoria shape group identities in the region? Dr. Gustavs Strenga shares insights into his research and parallels with modern-day memory wars. Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.Read more:Remembering the Dead: Collective Memory and Commemoration in Late Medieval Livonia Transcript Indra Ekmanis: Hello, and welcome to Baltic Ways, a podcast bringing you interviews and insights from the world of Baltic studies.I'm your host Indra Ekmanis, and today we're speaking with Gustavs Strenga, senior researcher at the Institute of Arts and Cultural Studies at the Latvian Academy of Culture and recently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of In Germany. Today, he speaks with us about his recent book, Remembering the Dead: Collective Memory and Commemoration in Late Medieval Livonia, and what parallels that might have for us today in the modern Baltic states. Stay tuned.Dr. Gustavs Strenga, thank you so much for joining us on Baltic Ways. Perhaps we can start, you can tell us a little bit about your background and how you came into this field of study.Gustavs Strenga: First of all, thank you for inviting me. Well, my background is I'm Latvian. I was born in Riga and I began my studies in Riga, in Latvia, and I studied history at the University of Latvia. And since high school, I had an interest in the history of the Catholic Church, partially because I went to a Catholic school. And during my studies, when I began studying at the end of the last century, beginning of this century, I understood that I'm interested into medieval history. I wrote my bachelor thesis and also later my MA about Dominicans. It's a mendicant order founded in the 13th century and they also had their priories in the Baltics, like in Riga and Tallinn. I spent, during my studies, a year in Lublin at the Catholic University of Lublin. I had a wonderful Erasmus semester in Kiel, in Germany. And I really understood that I want to do medieval history. In Riga, I had really two good professors who were teaching medieval history, but I understood that it's not enough, so I went to Budapest, the Central European University now located in Vienna, and I studied medieval studies there.And later, I had a chance to study at the University of Queen Mary in London, and I was supervised by Mary Rubin. And there, my interest in medieval commemoration began.And during my studies in London — it was a wonderful time — but I had a problem. I didn't have funding. So I moved to Germany to the University of Freiburg where I was writing — continuing writing my doctoral thesis on medieval commemoration and memory in Livonia. And after that, I had a chance to work at the National Library of Latvia, and also very exciting and interesting postdoctoral projects at the universities of Tallinn and Greifswald.IE: Wonderful. So that's interesting that your early experience in a Catholic school has brought you all the way into studying commemoration in medieval Livonia. Thanks. Thank you for sharing that.So, as I mentioned, you are the author of Remembering the Dead: Collective Memory and Commemoration in Late Medieval Livonia, which came out in November of 2023 and was also awarded the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies book publication subvention.It's also one of two recent monographs by Latvian historians to really be published internationally. And our colleague Una Bergmane, who also recently spoke on this podcast, published, published the other. The book examines the practices of remembering, and how those practices have influenced or had their impact on medieval Livonia, now modern day Latvia and Estonia. But I wonder if you can tell us a little bit more about that book. I gather it comes from your doctoral research — tell us a little bit more about the research that informs that work.GS: Yes, so this book, as you said, is a transformed version of my doctoral dissertation, which had a bit different title, and which I defended in 2013. And, after I finished writing the thesis, I understood, yes, I want to transform it into a book, but maybe with a bit different structure, so it took me quite a lot of time to restructure it.Though medieval commemoration of the dead had, of course, religious aims — for example, to lessen the suffering of the deceased in purgatory — I wanted to pursue the idea that the medieval commemoration of the dead was both a form of collective memory and also a social practice. As a form of collective memory, it created group self awareness of the past and thus shaped their identities.As a social practice, it created bonds between individuals and groups, and also between living and dead. I can demonstrate that by saying, for example, if someone in the Middle Ages wanted to be commemorated, the person had to have resources.IE: Yeah.GS: And resources could have been donated to a particular institution, and this institution — for example, a friary, a monastery, or a nunnery, or even a parish Church — this institution would, for example, say to some priests, you have to pray or celebrate the service, and you have to pray for a certain person. So it's a, basically it's a kind of an economy of gift exchange.IE: Yeah.GS: You're giving resources to someone to commemorate you. In my book I was looking more on groups. I was interested not so much into commemoration of individuals, because lots of research has been done in the field. For example, if some of the listeners are interested, you can look up the books on medieval memorial culture. I — rather, I was interested in that, how through the commemoration of the dead, groups were remembering their past. And this is, this is something maybe a bit different, just, looking at medieval memorial culture.Thus, in my book, I'm featuring several such groups. For example, the Church of Riga, which means the Cathedral chapter and the bishops, later archbishops. The Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order, different urban guilds and brotherhoods in Livonian cities like Riga and Tallinn. And I also was interested in — how did the collective memory shape relationships between these groups, particularly I was interested in the conflicts.IE: Mm hmm.GS: And in the case of my research, it's definitely influenced by the surviving sources. For example, in the book, you cannot read anything about how peasants were remembering the past in the Middle Ages through the commemoration of the dead, because yes, you have, you have archaeological material, but you don't have other kinds of sources, which would give some kind of a background information.Also, medieval artisan groups are not much represented. So it's a bit of — I would say it's a collection of case studies. My colleague, Marek Tamm, also partially criticized me of that, but I was interested really in the cases of the research, less perhaps painting this large landscape picture of the medieval commemoration in medieval Livonia, because I thought that's difficult to do because not many sources survive.As we know Livonia later, after the Middle Ages was a battleground between several large regional powers and many archives had burned down. And also lots of the churches have been destroyed. Also during the Reformation, altars, murals, other things involved in the commemoration of the dead have been destroyed.So, yes, it's, let's say, it's a collection of case studies looking at certain groups and how they were remembering their past in the long term.IE: Yeah, I'd like to ask you to, to talk about, a case study or two, but I wonder if you can tell us a little bit more, especially for the non-historians or people who are not really looking always at material from, from the middle ages — how do you go about finding your source material? What does that look like?GS: Particularly this research in this study, I was using all kinds of sources. Written sources. For example, you have testaments, last wills. Then you have chronicles. I was also using some books of different brotherhoods and guilds where, like, they were keeping their records and also recording how they are commemorating their dead.You have documents written down. You have necrologies. These are like calendars where you're putting the names of the dead and you know when they should be commemorated. Liturgical manuscripts, for example, missals. And you also have other kinds of sources. You have material culture. You have chalices. You have altar pieces. You have objects, tokens given to the poor in order that they know that they, that they receive alms, that they should commemorate someone.So, I was trying to use all kinds of sources. Also, last but not least, for example, the grave slabs, which are, some of them are surviving in the churches of former Livonia. So you have all kinds of sources, and I think this is what makes the study of commemoration interesting, that you can combine them. You're not just using written material, but you're trying to look on memory as something that was kept not only in one kind of media, but in numerous kinds of media.IE: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. In the book, I think you go into a variety of different kind of contexts, looking at elites, non elites, as you mentioned, urban and rural sort of practices, liturgical, non liturgical. We'd love to hear your thoughts on one or two of those case studies.GS: Yes, I think this book has several interesting case studies. I would just introduce a few of them. In most cases, the groups in the Middle Ages were, in fact, interested a lot in remembering their beginnings. Into remembering their origins.As most of the listeners would know, medieval Livonia was Christianized quite late. The Christianization process began only in the late 12th, early 13th century, when the missionaries and crusaders from northern Germany and Scandinavia arrived in the eastern Baltic, which we now know today as Latvia and Estonia. And it is the time when the history of two, let's say, most important institutions in the region begin, and this is the history of the Riga Church, particularly the Cathedral chapter, and the history of the Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order, and these groups in the late Middle Ages were looking back at their beginnings, and these events which took place in the late 12th and early 13th century were important for them. And also not just events, but also the dead of that age.We can say the collective memory of the Riga Cathedral chapter and Riga bishops, was not just carried by the famous and very well known text the Livonian and Chronicle of Henry, which was written around 1227, but also by Riga Cathedral itself. Riga, as a city, was founded in 1201, and then in 1211,the founder of the city, Bishop Albert, began constructing the cathedral.What do I mean, the Cathedral and its choir was memory itself — the space was the commemorative space? Before the city of Riga was founded, Livonia already had two dead bishops. The first bishop, the first missionary, Meinhard, and the second bishop, Bertolt, who was killed in a battle in 1198, just three years before the foundation of Riga.For every community in the Middle Ages, the founders were very important for their memory. So around 1229 when Bishop Albert died, or 1230, the bodies of Meinhard and Bertol were transferred from Ikšķile or Üxküll where they were buried, to the new cathedral and buried in the choir. And so we could say that in the Middle Ages, they were not just reading a chronicle, this one, for example, the Chronicle of Henry, or commemorating bishops liturgically, but also they were in contact with the graves, with the places where the bishops were buried. So it was both. A phenomenon of memory that was recorded in the texts and performed during the liturgy. And also, we can say it was a physical experience, because still, though historians are arguing about that — whether in the Middle Ages, the three founding bishops of Rīga's Church were considered to be saints — we can say that they were seen as a holy man. Maybe, yes, we can still argue about their sainthood because they were never canonized in the Middle Ages, but they were seen also as important founding figures.In the case of the Teutonic Order, it is a bit different. Spaces — maybe if we are talking about this memory of the origins or memory of the beginning — spaces are maybe not so important. More, we have textual sources showing how the Teutonic Order's Livonian branch were commemorating their death. For example, the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle — text composed around 1290 — the text has numerous references to the brethren of the Teutonic Order who had been killed during the battles against the Baltic pagans during the 13th century. Later, it's very interesting, in 14th and 15th century, we can trace numerous necrologies of the Teutonic Order, not in Livonia, but nowadays Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland, where we can see the Teutonic Order were — that they were Commemorating those men, their own brethren, killed in distant Livonia.Sometimes they were misspelling the name of Livonia. Most likely those people who were recording these records in the necrologies or commemorating these dead brethren, they didn't know where Livonia is, but still, this experience of crusading was part of the Teutonic Order's collective memory.It's also interesting that in the later times, as I was saying about the commemorative culture of the Riga Cathedral, we have some evidence of the commemoration. For example, the Missal of Riga — the sole complete manuscript from the Middle Ages that gives us a glimpse into how liturgy in medieval Riga looked like. In this missile, we can also spot several instances where we can see the curation of the Riga archbishops. Their names have been recorded. And also, this is a time when there was a conflict between the Teutonic Order and the Cathedral Chapter of Riga. Because the Teutonic Order, during the late 15th century, wanted to take control over the Cathedral of Riga, and also over the cathedral chapter, and you can see the struggle also in the commemoration, because the records are telling us that these archbishops had died, during captivity into the Teutonic Order's prison, for example.IE: Well, yeah, thank you for sharing those, those glimpses into those case studies.And, you know, when I first thought about that topic of medieval Livonia, it wasn't totally clear to me how it drew to my own interest, but I was really drawn in, even by those first few paragraphs. You know, you talk about memoria as this form of collective memory and social practice that creates groups, that shapes identities, that helps remember the past, and creates those relationships.And I was thinking about, how does that translate a little bit into today's society? You know, collective memory group identity still plays such an important role in our world, and so, I wonder — do you have any insights as to what, what your work might tell us about the Baltic nations today?GS: It is indeed difficult to link medieval history with the contemporary world.IE: Yeah.GS: But, I would say that the commemoration of the dead is a phenomenon that shows that every group, in every historical period, is remembering their dead. So we can see the commemoration of the dead as a basic form of collective memory. And, if we look to the past, we can also see conflicts that have been created by different memories. And, today we are living into the age of memory wars in, in the Baltics.IE: Yeah.GS: Let's just remember, for example, the removal of the so-called Alyosha statue in Tallinn in 2007 and the riots which began afterwards and which were also supported by Russia in numerous ways, also by cyberattacks.IE: Right.GS: And also the removal of the monument to the Liberators of Soviet Latvia and from the German fascist invaders — now I'm just quoting the official name of that monument, which was removed in Riga in 2022. So these and also early examples show us that Baltics have experienced different practices of erasing memory.IE: Yeah.GS: Also, of trying to replace the memories. If we remember that during Soviet times in Latvia and also in Estonia, numerous monuments erected during the interwar period, for example, commemorating the independence wars against, against different forces, including Soviet Russia, those monuments were destroyed in the 1940s, 1950s in Latvia and Estonia. And afterwards, many of these monuments were restored by the movements.IE: Yeah.GS: So there we can see some kinds of parallels and this is quite similar to that, what I'm trying to show in my book, long term developments of commemoration and remembering.IE: Yeah. The long tail and how, how it is, perpetually moving that collective identity. Um, maybe we can talk a little bit about your current project on Saints and Heroes: From Christianization to Nationalism. Can you tell us a little bit about that work, as well?GS: Yes. In 2021, I had a chance, together with my colleague Cordelia Heß from the University of Greifswald to revisit the question of remembering in quite different settings. So, together with Cordelia Heß and also our partners from the State University of St. Petersburg in Russia, we created a project. It was a Russian-German co-project [financed by Deutsche Forschungs Gemeinschaft]. We were working on the medieval saints and medieval heroes in the Baltic Sea region and how they have been used and later abused after the medieval times.Yes, and I have to say that when Russia's full scale invasion in Ukraine began, our cooperation was discontinued, though we continue working on our part, let's say, on our German part of the project.IE: Yeah.GS: The idea behind was really to look at these long term developments in remembering medieval figures. I can assume that many listeners know medieval heroes, for example, Joan Arc, or Emperor Barbarossa, or Charlemagne, or Scottish and Welsh rebels, William Wallace and Owen Glyndwyr, or Russian Prince and Saint Alexander Nevsky, who nowadays is abused by Putin's regime. And in the case of these all figures, you can see different ways how people have been remembering them and also using them, for example, much later in the 19th and 20th century for nation building or for creation of smaller groups. We have lots of examples — for example, in Scandinavia, that medieval saints in late 19th and early 20th century, played very important role in creating identity of Catholic groups in these countries, because let's remember that Scandinavia became Protestant after the Reformation, and then when there was this Catholic revival, many Swedish intellectuals were choosing St. Bridget as their patron and also revisiting the materials of the canonization process of St. Bridget and also living this medieval religious life during the late 19th and early 20th century.Within the project, I was working on Baltic medieval heroes. That's, for example, the master of the Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order, Walter von Plettenberg, who was a Baltic German hero in the 19th century and also in the early 20th century. I was also working on Latvian medieval kings as heroes — for example, Viesturs and Namējs. As listeners would know, those were not real kings. During the 1920s and '30s in Latvia, they were called kings, but they were just leaders of the local ethnic groups. In the case of the Viesturs and Namējs, those were Semigallians. And I wrote an article, which has been recently published, on Liv warrior Imanta, who has been mentioned in medieval sources just once, in the Livonian Chronicle of Henry, in the scene where Imanta killed Bishop Bertold, who was mentioned in this podcast earlier.And, it is, in fact, fascinating to see that in the Baltic case, not so much history writing has been important for the revival of these medieval heroes, but literature, poetry, and also drama. Those have been the main tools — in the case of Imanta, also one of the main tools has been music, a song, which has been composed at the beginning of the 20th century, using lyrics of Latvian poet Andres Pumpurs. And the result that can be read in the case of the project is a book called Doing Memory: Medieval Saints and Heroes and Their Afterlives in the Baltic Sea Region (19th–20th centuries), that has been recently published by De Gruyter. And there we have 10 contributions about different medieval saints and heroes from Scandinavia, from Northern Germany, and also Latvia, Estonia, and Finland.IE: That is really interesting to see how arts, literature, music, theater come into play in rememberings, as well. We really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us and to share this glimpse into medieval history, medieval Livonia. The book grabbed me from the very beginning. So thank you so much, for your time and for sharing your thoughts with us.GS: Thank you. It was a pleasure.IE: Thank you for tuning in to Baltic Ways, a podcast from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. A note that the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI. I'm your host, Indra Ekmanis. Subscribe to our newsletters@aabs-balticstudies.org and FPRI.org/baltic-initiative for more from the world of Baltic Studies. Thanks for listening and see you next time. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fpribalticinitiative.substack.com

The Borat movies were a fun but far fetched parody right? Think again. The Central Asian nation of Turkmenistan is currently ruled by the clownish Gurbangulyýewiç Berdimuhamedow and his son Serdar. He has styled himself as an action hero. Unfortunately he isn't very good at racing, handling horses, firing guns, singing, dancing, weight lifting, rapping or any of the other "talents" he likes to demonstrate.  He is also a tyrant, presiding over an oppressive system of government that has seen untold numbers of political opponents thrown into horrific dungeons. How did he get the job? Well because he was the dentist of his predecessor the equally bizarre Saparmurat Niyazov. Makes sense right? Of course it doesn't but it is true and my guest today -- revered journalist Bruce Pannier a fellow of the Foreign Policy Institute was in Central Asia when the USSR ended and this peculiar new system of government arose from its ashes. We discuss Bruce's firsthand insights into the hermit-like nation. He shares amusing anecdotes about the seemingly insane rulers, and shares his thoughts on more serious topics including life for the Turkmen people, terrorism, and international relations.  Guest: Bruce Pannier is a Central Asia Fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a longtime journalist and correspondent covering Central Asia. He currently writes Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's blog, Qishloq Ovozi, and appears regularly on the Majlis podcast for RFE/RL. Prior to joining RFE/RL in 1997, Bruce worked at the Open Media Research Institute in Prague. In 1992, he led a sociological project in Central Asia sponsored by the University of Manchester and the Soros Cultural Initiative Foundation. During that time he lived in villages in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Bruce studied at Tashkent State University in the summer of 1990 and studied at Columbia University under Professor Edward Allworth. Bruce has also written for The Economist, Janes Intelligence, Oxford Analytica, Freedom House, The Cairo Review, the FSU Oil & Gas Monitor, and Energo Weekly.   Music: Performed by Gurbanghuly and Serdar Berdimuhamedow -- yes the "rap" song is actually written and performed by the President and his son. This episode is sponsored by World History Encyclopedia, one of the top history websites on the internet. I love the fact that they're not a Wiki: Every article they publish is reviewed by their editorial team, not only for being accurate but also for being interesting to read. The website is run as a non-profit organization, so you won't be bombarded by annoying ads and it's completely free. It's a great site, and don't just take my word for it they've been recommended by many academic institutions including Oxford University. Go check them out at WorldHistory.org or follow this link: World History Encyclopedia. Фильмы о Борате были забавной, но надуманной пародией, верно? Подумайте еще раз. Центральноазиатским государством Туркменистаном в настоящее время правят шут Гурбангулыевич Бердымухамедов и его сын Сердар. Он назвал себя героем боевиков. К сожалению, он не очень хорош в скачках, обращении с лошадьми, стрельбе из оружия, пении, танцах, поднятии тяжестей, рэпе и других «талантах», которые он любит демонстрировать.  Он также является тираном, возглавляющим репрессивную систему правления, которая видела бесчисленное количество политических оппонентов, брошенных в ужасающие темницы. Как он получил эту работу? Ну, потому что он был дантистом своего предшественника, столь же эксцентричного Сапармурата Ниязова. Имеет смысл, не так ли? Конечно, это не так, но это правда, и мой сегодняшний гость - уважаемый журналист Брюс Паннье, сотрудник Института внешней политики, был в Центральной Азии, когда СССР распался и из его пепла возникла эта своеобразная новая система правления.  

Sadyr Japarov has been the President of Kyrgyzstan since 2021. Japarov's rise to power came after his country had experienced three revolutions in 15 years, in a part of the World unused to political upheaval. Today's episode investigates whether the three Kyrgyz revolutions, so unusual for Central Asia, have benefited the country's development. On the one hand, they sent a message to national and regional elites that their people had a voice, and were willing to use it. On the other, Japarov has made political hay out of the disorder visited upon Kyrgyzstan as a result of 15 years of turmoil, and is now rolling back democratic freedoms in the country. My guest today is Bruce Pannier. Bruce is a Central Asia Fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a longtime journalist and correspondent covering Central Asia. He also writes Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's blog, Qishloq Ovozi.

Renowned Asia expert Michael Auslin is pivoting from Asia instead of towards it: today, he joins Madison's Notes to discuss his new project on the history of Washington, D.C., which, like ancient Rome or Victorian London, is a world capital of a nation at the height of its power. He explores the city's development from its early days to its role during pivotal moments in American history, including the Civil War and the Cold War, building on the research he shares in his Substack The Patowmack Packet. Dr. Michael Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is the author of six books, including Asia's New Geopolitics and The End of the Asian Century, as well as the host of The Pacific Century podcast. Previously, he was an associate professor of history at Yale University, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo. He is also a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the senior advisor for Asia at the Halifax International Security Forum, a senior fellow at London's Policy Exchange, and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Renowned Asia expert Michael Auslin is pivoting from Asia instead of towards it: today, he joins Madison's Notes to discuss his new project on the history of Washington, D.C., which, like ancient Rome or Victorian London, is a world capital of a nation at the height of its power. He explores the city's development from its early days to its role during pivotal moments in American history, including the Civil War and the Cold War, building on the research he shares in his Substack The Patowmack Packet. Dr. Michael Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is the author of six books, including Asia's New Geopolitics and The End of the Asian Century, as well as the host of The Pacific Century podcast. Previously, he was an associate professor of history at Yale University, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo. He is also a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the senior advisor for Asia at the Halifax International Security Forum, a senior fellow at London's Policy Exchange, and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Aaron Stein, president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute(fpri.org), shares his insights with us on the Israel-Hamas conflict.  With as many critical issues affected by it, first and foremost the lives of the hostages and citizens on both Israel and Gaza, we wanted to find an expert to help us to better understand these turbulent … Read More Read More

This Week's Guests: Dr. Afshon Ostovar Book: https://www.amazon.com/Wars-Ambition-United-States-Struggle/dp/0190940980 Episode 319 "Rethink Production presents "Live From America Podcast" - a weekly show that combines political commentary with humor. Hosted by the comedy cellar owner Noam Dworman and producer Hatem Gabr, the show features expert guests discussing news, culture, and politics with a blend of knowledge and laughter. Dr. Afshon Ostovar is an Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of the award-winning Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics, and Iran's Revolutionary Guards, and a frequent contributor to Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, War on the Rocks, and other outlets. His forthcoming book Wars of Ambition: The United States, Iran, and the Struggle for the Middle East, tells the story of how the U.S invasion of Iraq ignited a storm of competition for regional dominance, which continues to play out in the region's wars. Today he's joining us in a personal capacity, and so it should be understood that all the opinions expressed are his, and do not reflect in any way those of the institutions with which he is affiliated.” Follow Live From America YouTube @livefromamericapodcast Twitter twitter.com/AmericasPodcast www.LiveFromAmericaPodcast.com LiveFromAmericapodcast@gmail.com Follow Hatem Twitter twitter.com/HatemNYC Instagram www.instagram.com/hatemnyc/ Follow Noam Twitter twitter.com/noam_dworman #UNDERSTANDINGIRAN #AfshonOstovar #IRAN

This year, NATO marks its 75th anniversary, while the Baltic countries celebrate 20 years as members of the alliance. Dr. Lukas Milevski speaks about the history of that inclusion, and shares his thoughts about the future. Milevski is a tenured assistant professor at Leiden University, where he teaches strategic studies in the BA International Studies and MA International Relations programs. He has published widely on strategy, including two books with Oxford University Press: The Evolution of Modern Grand Strategic Thought (2016) and The West's East: Contemporary Baltic Defense in Strategic Perspective (2018).For more from the world of Baltic studies visit us on Substack. Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.

This year, NATO marks its 75th anniversary, while the Baltic countries celebrate 20 years as members of the alliance. Dr. Lukas Milevski speaks about the history of that inclusion, and shares his thoughts about the future.Milevski is a tenured assistant professor at Leiden University, where he teaches strategic studies in the BA International Studies and MA International Relations programs. He has published widely on strategy, including two books with Oxford University Press: The Evolution of Modern Grand Strategic Thought (2016) and The West's East: Contemporary Baltic Defense in Strategic Perspective (2018).Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.TranscriptIndra Ekmanis: Hello, and welcome to Baltic Ways, a podcast bringing you interviews and insights from the world of Baltic studies. I'm your host, Dr. Indra Ekmanis. And today we speak with Dr. Lucas Milevski, a tenured assistant professor at Leiden University, where he teaches strategic studies. This year marks 75 years of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and 20 years of the Baltic states' inclusion in that alliance. Dr. Milevski gives us his insights into the history, and what may be next for the Baltic states as part of NATO. Stay tuned.IE: Thank you so much for joining us today on Baltic Ways. Perhaps we can start with you telling us a little bit about yourself, your background and how you came to be involved in this field of study.Lukas Milevski: I'm Lukas Milevski. I'm presently an assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. And for an American audience, it's worthwhile to mention that in the Netherlands, assistant professor is a tenured position. And I research and write about military strategy in general, theory, history, contemporary analysis, as well as contemporary military defense.I am a Latvian American dual citizen, so I've also maintained both a personal and a professional interest in Baltic defense. I published my first piece on that topic way back in 2010 when I was still a master's student. I published a book on the subject, The West's East: Contemporary Baltic Defense in Strategic Perspective, in 2018, and have continued writing on the topic regularly ever since for various venues, including FPRI's own Baltic Bulletin.IE: Well, thank you for sharing that background. We are here to talk a little bit about NATO today. NATO this year celebrates its 75th anniversary in April. In March, the Baltic states also celebrate 20 years of being in the alliance, having joined in 2004. As we commemorate these milestones, how would you describe the organization's evolution, its history with the Baltic states from your perspective?LM: So 75 years of history is quite a bit, especially for an international alliance. And I'm sure there will be plenty written on this history to mark the 75th anniversary. So what I'll do now is just sketch out certain inflection points in NATO's history and the degree to which the Baltic states featured in those points or experienced consequences as a result, whether positive or negative.So the first inflection point is obviously 75 years ago itself, when NATO was founded. In the words of Lord Ismay, who was its first Secretary General, NATO was founded to keep the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Russians out. We don't consider that second purpose relevant anymore, but the other two have remained wholly relevant.The Baltic states during this time were, of course, occupied by the Soviet Union, and simply formed part of the enemy for NATO. The next real inflection point was the end of the Cold War and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, which allowed the Baltic states to spring out of national captivity, and begin plotting their own national courses again. Unsurprisingly, this pointed them toward NATO, which in any case, had lost its primary reason for existence and only awkwardly found itself seeking organizational purpose in intervening in the Western Balkans as Yugoslavia collapsed. During the 1990s, there was a Western defense professional debate about Baltic membership in NATO, which played out in various venues, including professional and academic journals.Notably, there were some quite prescient arguments that leaving them out of NATO would ultimately be destabilizing as they would present power vacuums, which would only invite invasion at some subsequent undetermined later date. You know, essentially exactly what happened to Ukraine.IE: Right.LM: The next key inflection point was the terror attack on, terror attacks on 9/11, which finally gave NATO a mission again, counterterrorism, and incidentally the only invocation of Article 5, NATO's mutual defense clause, in the history of the alliance, by the United States. In the early atmosphere of the war on terror, Russia was a quasi ally, and this atmosphere helped, perhaps enabled, the Baltic states to slip into NATO and the European Union simultaneously in spring 2004 — March for NATO, May for the EU.The relatively warm atmosphere between NATO and Russia, and NATO's counter terrorism and counter insurgency focus, somewhat precluded NATO membership from meaning terribly much for the Baltic States. There is no real contingency defense planning for national defense, for example. Because the only threat was Russia, and the West mostly did not see Russia as a possible threat, the Baltic states and maybe some other Eastern Flank countries excepted. The one exception to this relative negligence was the Baltic air policing mission, which began right from the Baltic accession to NATO and continues to the present day. It took until the next inflection point in 2008, Russia's invasion of Georgia, to shake NATO's complacency about Russia, albeit not by that much.IE: Yeah.LM: Baltic defense planning became permissible, but without a proper political decision, more sort of as an annex to defense planning for Polish defense. And then NATO and most of its constituent countries sank back into unwarranted complacency. The story somewhat repeated in 2014. Russia invaded another country, NATO responded, including this time by redefining Russia as a potential enemy and moving some tripwire forces into the Baltic states.IE: Can you say what that means? What a tripwire force is?LM: Idea of a tripwire force is simply to have forces from other member countries present in the region so that if Russia were to invade, they'd not just be shooting at local Baltic armed forces, but also those of ideally each of the other member states as well. And this would then immediately, in principle, involve those other states in Baltic defense.So NATO moves some tripwire forces into the Baltic states. This was probably mostly due to strenuous U.S. pressure on European member states, which seemed rather unwilling at the time. Nonetheless, this was done, and then afterward NATO slipped back into a certain degree of unwarranted complacency, again, particularly the European member states and the Western European member states.And finally, most recently, 2022 and the renewed Russian invasion of Ukraine. Baltic defense is again high on the agenda. NATO's four deployed forces, the tripwire forces, are to be expanded from battalion size to brigade size, basically from 1,000 men to about four to five thousand-ish. And the unwarranted complacency about Russia has yet to return.Hopefully it won't, but of course we don't know the future. As a result of this infection point as well, Finland and, finally, Sweden have also joined NATO, thereby turning the Baltic [Sea] into a NATO lake and increasing military and naval security in the region. But what we really see as a history is that NATO has only gradually, and mostly unwillingly, paid any attention, let alone serious attention, to Baltic defense.Fortunately, for most of that history, it turned out not to be a fatal mistake. And we can now hope, and perhaps work, to develop NATO defense planning and policies finally to ensure real Baltic defense. This is work not only by NATO or the larger states, but also, and of course crucially, by the Baltic states themselves, and we do see that this is happening.IE: Yeah. It strikes me that, you know, we have many headlines in U.S. outlets since 2022 and the Russian invasion — full scale invasion of Ukraine — featuring Baltic leaders. Just the other day I heard Kaja Kallas on, on NPR's “Morning Edition,” for example. And so this has become kind of a mainstay.I wonder if you can tell us — we talked about that now the Baltics are here in NATO for two decades — and over the last two decades, how has NATO's presence influenced regional security dynamics in the Baltic region? Maybe, the addition of Finland and Sweden and the creation of Lake NATO, if you will. But also how have the Baltic states themselves influenced NATO?LM: So NATO's presence in the Baltic Sea region, particularly with the accession of the Baltic states, resolved the one major geopolitical issue which I already mentioned, the notion of the power vacuum in between NATO and Russia, at least in this region, which could have — and knowing Russia — would have eventually invited trouble. And so in principle, this issue is no more. But in practice, as I was sort of saying, in terms of defense planning and everything, this remains a work in progress. So besides this key point, NATO's presence in the Baltic region over the last 20 years hasn't really affected security dynamics all that much, I think, for a number of reasons.First of all, besides the Baltic region's national forces — the local Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian forces and so on — the NATO presence itself has been quite minimal for most of those two decades. The air policing mission since 2004, the tripwire forces from 2016 onward, but the additional NATO non-Baltic physical, material, military manpower capability to affect security dynamics meaningfully has not really been there.It's only now, you know, in the past few years that we've been seeing some actual substantial change. As I also already mentioned, for most of the past 20 years, NATO has not been focusing on territorial defense, but it's been looking halfway across the world, generating expeditionary capabilities to wage war in Afghanistan.So the alliance had little time, little capability, and little desire really to consider the Baltic seriously. Third, for the early years of the war on terror, Russia was, as I said, something of an ally. And moreover, it was also wrestling with its own internal security issues. Its war with Georgia in 2008 showed major problems in its armed forces, which it spent the next few years fixing, or at least thinking it was fixing them.And as a bit of an aside on this war: This, the Russian perspective, is very distinct. They feel like they almost lost the war because of how poorly their armed forces performed, hence the need to reform them. And then of course, after Georgia, it focused on supporting the Assad regime in Syria and then add into all this is its perpetual fixation with Ukraine in 2014, even prior to 2014. And of course, after 2014 as well. So there's a good recipe for Russia also perhaps not dedicating an enormous amount of attention to the Baltic states either, and I'm no fan of Russia, but I think it's notable nonetheless that at the worst of the 2008 financial crisis, and Latvia was hit harder than most, there was no special Russian attempt to exploit the crisis to topple the Latvian or any other Baltic government.You know, nothing beyond the usual corruption, money laundering, subversion, and general criminality. Why not is a different question, and one which we can't answer. You know, even if we had Putin here on a table, and we cracked his skull open with a hammer and chisel, presumably we would find that he had a brain, but that wouldn't tell us anything about his thoughts. So we don't know why they didn't do anything, but it is perhaps notable that they didn't really do anything — at least nothing special.Finally, if you look at the defense literature, once Western military analysts began paying attention to the problems of Baltic defense again after 2014, the recurring theme which you see is one of apprehension: That Russia has the advantage in the Baltic Sea region. Because with its missiles — anti-ship missiles, anti-air missiles — it could create a Baltic bubble, from which, it could deny access to NATO forces. So there's a distinct sense in which it's actually been Russia which maintains an advantage in the Baltic Sea region.And this is only beginning to change now as a result of the war and its consequences. Both in terms of Finnish and Swedish accession to NATO, as well as in terms of damage to Russia's own armed forces. And in terms of Baltic influence, I see relatively little. As mentioned, improvements of Baltic defense have generally followed Russian aggression, and usually have been as little as NATO believed it could get away with, especially the Western European countries. Is that changing now? We'll see.IE: Yeah, well, tell us tell us in a little bit about — I mean, I feel like there was a lot of conversation early on in after the renewed invasion about the Baltics kind of having this “we told you so mentality,” to their Western Western European partners and to their American partners too in some to some degree. And then, yes, we have seen kind of these incremental shifts in the way that NATO is taking their Eastern Flank a little bit more seriously. You mentioned the increase in their tripwire forces. But what about tangible sort of feeling on the ground? How do you assess NATO's ability to deter a potential threat and uphold security? What are some of those key challenges, or maybe opportunities, in the Baltics? You talked about the Russian advantage. And maybe aside from NATO, what are the steps that the Baltic states are taking on their own? We have a lot of talk about defense investments in the Baltic states themselves. So, I'd love to hear your thoughts.LM: Yes. Well, to start with deterrence, the problem with deterrence is that, sort of, to deter, the infinitive verb is grammatically correct, but strategically inaccurate. We cannot deter. The other side chooses to be deterred. We can provide the reasons for them to choose to be deterred, but beyond that, it's fundamentally out of our hands. And we have a hard time knowing what the other side is thinking. You know, again, think of poking around Putin's brain, it tells us nothing. Worse still, he has to believe that anything we try to do is to strengthen deterrence. You know, truly, if we're putting forces into the Baltic states, it's for the purposes of deterrence and not something else, invasion.IE: Right.LM: But what the Russians are doing is giving constant signals that they don't trust the NATO presence in the Baltic states. They feel like a country under siege and generally speaking, they're paranoid of surprise attacks. So in communicating this to us, are they telling the truth or are they just cynically trying to dissuade us? Or is a little of Column A, a little of Column B, depending on the person speaking at that moment? We don't know, but this complicates the picture.It does not, however, mean that we should appease them and not try to strengthen deterrence. We obviously should. That's part of NATO's core mission. So then, going to what NATO is trying to do or what it can try to do — NATO's fundamental posture to try to instill deterrence rests on Article 5, the Mutual Defense Clause, as well as extended nuclear deterrence. In abstract, the latter is always a hard sell, just like it was during the Cold War. The notion of extended nuclear deterrence is that, essentially, the United States would protect Europe with a nuclear umbrella. It's extending its hand, willing to take nuclear blows to protect its allies. But would the United States, or for that matter Britain or France, you know, really sacrifice Washington, D.C., London, or Paris for the sake of Tallinn, Riga, or Vilnius?That's impossible to know, but at the same time, it's not a possibility that the Russians can ignore. So, allies never find it particularly compelling, and this was true during the Cold War as well, but adversaries do still have to take it seriously. Article 5, meanwhile, depends on NATO's ability actually to sustain a major military operation in the Baltic states, something which it is still in the process of trying to develop. It might also rely on keeping substantial forces positioned in the Baltic states, something which it is also developing. I mentioned the forward deployed forces expanding from battalion to brigade size, which will help with that. Germany is planning on deploying an entire brigade into Lithuania. And so this will all help with that.Is this enough to present a sufficiently credible threat of successful defense that the Russians would think better of any hypothetical future invasion? We simply don't know. Prudence is pulling us in two ways. We don't want to leave the Baltics undefended because that might invite invasion. But at the same time, we don't want to put too much in because the Russians might take that really seriously the wrong way. We need to find somewhere a middle ground, notwithstanding all of NATO's and especially all, all other American commitments elsewhere in the world.So, it's a thorny problem.IE: Yeah.LM: As for the Baltic states themselves, they face a wide variety of challenges to improving their own defense. The most fundamental one is that the Russian threat can be quite multi-dimensional, and so the Baltic states need to have some sort of capability to answer, to some degree, each of those dimensions, even without NATO support, to buy time for NATO support to arrive.You know, we're talking from land invasion with heavy armor to airborne coup de main, such as what Russia tried to do in the very first days of their invasion, renewed invasion of Ukraine back in February 2022. Russian air and missile strikes against land, sea, and air targets, cyber attacks, and electronic warfare, and many other forms of attack.You know, Russia can make the life of a Baltic defense planner really difficult, just as it currently is for Ukrainian strategists. So the Baltic challenge is spreading their limited budgets around in ways which are, or at least appear to be, good enough. At least good enough to be able to blunt an initial attack and buy time.So for this reason, Latvia and Estonia jointly procured a German IRIS-T medium range air defense system, which has been doing excellent work in Ukraine to help contribute against the missile plane and the possibility of an airborne coup de main threat. If you have air defense, it's less likely that Russian helicopters will get through, that Russian missiles will get through, and so on. Baltic states are developing a Baltic defense line, and they are expanding their armed forces, including reintroducing conscription, in Latvia's case, to help defend against a major ground invasion. They are procuring coastal defense systems to deny Russia the ability to attack them by sea.And this is all very good. It's very important. It's demonstrating a clear will to defend to the rest of NATO that the Baltic states will defend themselves in the hypothetical event of invasion. And so it puts additional political and moral pressure on the rest of NATO also to step up more. But of course, the Baltic states, on their own will, will simply never be enough to defend successfully against a country with a military the size of Russia's.This is an unavoidable fact. And this is the final challenge for the Baltic States, that ultimately they cannot guarantee their own national security, their own national survival by themselves without NATO support if Russia were really to try to challenge it with a major invasion.IE: Yeah. You mentioned this kind of goodwill, or moral pressure that is also part of the Baltic states' defense plan in some ways. And I am thinking about that in their accession and the way that the Baltic states responded and showed up, for example, in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks. So, I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about how the Baltic states have contributed to NATO's missions and operations. Whether or not their participation has shaped any of the alliance's strategies or priorities.LM: So ever since they regained independence and developed their own armed forces, the Baltic states have tried to be good citizens of the liberal international order and have committed forces to international operations, including NATO, but also EU missions, UN missions, other allied missions — of course, within the scope of their own available resources.For most missions over the past 30 years, the Baltic commitment has been small, both comparatively and sort of absolutely. And of course, the degree of commitment for each mission in which the Baltic states individually or collectively have been involved has also varied over time.So just to sort of touch on a few examples, they sent soldiers to the various missions resulting from the violent collapse of Yugoslavia. Even today, Latvia and Lithuania are still contributing to KFOR in Kosovo. Lithuania has one soldier there, but with a Seimas mandate for up to five, while Latvia has committed 136 military personnel to that mission.Estonia, meanwhile, participated in the French Operation Barkhane in Mali, originally dedicating 50 troops and raising the number to 95 in 2019, until the end of the operation there in 2022. And Estonia's participation in Barkhane was appreciated in Paris and led to a considerable amount of French goodwill.So this indicates the importance of not just NATO missions, but looking beyond NATO missions, to other missions, because, yes, a lot of countries are part of NATO, they're also part of EU, membership overlaps, and even contributing to other states' national missions can have beneficial consequences within the NATO context.IE: Sure.LM: Most prominently, of course, the Baltic states had all contributed troops to the wars in Iraq as part of the Coalition of the Willing, as well as to the International Security Assistance Force, the NATO force in Afghanistan. So from the Baltic point of view of the past 20 years, which is totally understandable, the United States was always going to be the single most important guarantor of Baltic military and national security.The subsequent question — the degree to which Baltic involvement has led to influence — is much less clear. For one, you know, much of that would happen behind closed doors. But it is fair to say that there were some early attitudes toward the Baltic states, which were quite fundamentally not promising, notably from some Western European countries.The most infamous example is probably Jacques Chirac's outburst, as president of France in 2003 — and this was admittedly, you know, a year before Baltic accession to NATO and the EU — dismayed by the Vilnius letter, which a number of current Eastern Flank countries drafted in support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and publicly criticized those Eastern Flank countries, or now Eastern Flank countries, for failing to take the opportunity, and this is a quote, to 'shut up.' So there's always been this sort of sense that the older member states, particularly in Western Europe, simply know better than the newer Eastern Flank members, including, totally absurdly, about Russia.This has proved a rather difficult cultural bias for the Baltic states and other Eastern Flank countries to overcome. And one in which the star player in any Baltic success, as I've already said, really has been Russia for consistently defying European expectations and European excuses for Russian behavior.So from 2022 onward, the older Western European member states have finally, and I do think it's finally, begun learning a bit of humility, which opens up more space and willingness to listen to others. The U.S. pattern in all this has been notably different pretty consistently for most of the past 25 years. New administrations entered the White House seeking cooperation with Russia. Bush, after 9/11, when he looked into Putin's eyes and saw his soul, famously. Obama, when he sought to reset relations with Russia. Trump, with his near total subservience to Russia. Yet almost as consistently, the outgoing administration had become totally disillusioned about Russia as a result of outrageous Russian behavior. Bush after the invasion of Georgia, Obama after the invasion of Crimea and Donbass. Only Trump didn't experience that. And with the Biden administration, which came in in 2020, it at least entered office finally already wary of Russia. So the U.S. track record is actually quite different from the Western European track record. It's much more variable, much more uneven, but at key moments, it's been much more in favor of Russia, of Baltic defense, and of supporting the Baltic states.IE: Yeah. So NATO leaders are going to gather in D.C. in July, for the summit that marks the 75th anniversary of the alliance. But we're also coming up on the American elections in November. So I wonder how you see the US elections impacting NATO, especially as we are looking again at a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and what you might see for the future of NATO in the coming years — particularly for the Baltics, but more generally too.LM: This is, of course, the big question, and the correct answer is, it's impossible to say. It'll be hard enough to imagine, even when we know who the next president will be, let alone now. But we can talk about what we know now, and try to think about the future.Because both Trump and Biden do have presidential track records now. And Trump's isn't as bad as everyone imagined beforehand, but that's largely because policy is slow to change. And throughout much of his administration, the Department of Defense was following plans already laid down and confirmed and set in motion by the previous Obama administration. Moreover, Trump actually had intelligent adults in the room with him for much of his administration, and the Senate in particular remained very pro-NATO. Both of which limited the negative consequences.In the unfortunate event of a Trump victory in November, the basic policy reality that change is hard to achieve will remain in force. But he is unlikely to have in the room nearly the same number or quality of intelligent adults as before. The Republican contingent in the Senate may also become less pro-NATO as well, with Mitch McConnell passing the torch — his pro-NATO attitudes being one of his very few virtues.On the other hand, you know, we can, and if you like, should, hope for a Biden victory. Then hopefully there won't be much change, at least for another four years. So just a continued trajectory for strengthening Baltic defense further. Or we might even plausibly expect, or hope for, at least, change for the better, as the Republican Party, which has been held hostage by Trump over the past half year or so in particular, will lose the need to try to deny Democrats political victories in the lead up to the national election, which is something they're doing now.But besides the variable of the U.S., there is still Europe, and it remains a variable as well. One increasingly highlighted as Trump has had contact with Orbán recently.IE: Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary.LM: Yes, who is also quite pro-Russian. But so in Europe too, a certain degree of pro-Russian feeling is spreading. Most recently With Robert Fico, a Slovakian populist, being elected prime minister in Slovakia. Moreover, many European countries still are not hitting the 2 percent of GDP mark agreed upon nearly a decade ago now, in September, 2014. And even if they were, the money spending practices of certain number of states is quite suspect. Now, regardless of the amount of money, the German defense budget is in an absolute state and one which more money on its own simply will not change at this moment. You need to change the processes, the bureaucracy, and the practices first before more money will make much of a difference. We have seen, however, a recent headline from Trump saying that if European NATO members were to pay more then, he'd be more amenable to staying in NATO.So he's shown some degree of flexibility, whether that's just for show or real is a different question. But nonetheless, Trump is trying to soften some bits of his sort of anti-NATO rhetoric. And even as the war continues in Ukraine and even assuming NATO countries individually and in cooperation are able to return to supporting Ukraine effectively, the next years will see NATO as an alliance, or its member states as individuals, addressing a wide variety of problems to both improve the quality and the quantity of the defense which can be provided — to the Baltic states, to Europe in general. Every Western military is probably feeling a certain sense of crisis in the face of what they see going on in Ukraine right now. And, going, sort of going back to the professional literature which I read on military strategy and all that, there have been some expressed doubts as to whether or not the U.S. could actually wage war. A major war going back to well before the Russian invasion in 2022 and what we see going on now and the difficulty of winning on the battlefield and so on and so forth. There's a lot of thinking going on, so a lot of this doesn't have much to do necessarily with political leadership, but it's just how militaries are trying to reimagine how they might want to, or perhaps might need to do things on and off the battlefield in order to continue being effective organizations for national defense. So the presidential race is a big story, but there's plenty of other stories, as well.IE: Yeah. So reminding us there's plenty going on beneath the surface beyond political leadership changes. Well, Dr. Milevski, I want to thank you so much for being with us on Baltic Ways, for giving us your insights as we are approaching these significant milestones, this significant year for NATO, for the Baltics in NATO. And we really appreciate your commentary.Thank you. Thank you so much.LM: Thank you for having me.IE: Thank you for tuning in to Baltic ways. A podcast from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. A note that the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI. I'm your host Indra Ekmanis. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fpribalticinitiative.substack.com

In conversation with Robert E. Hamilton, Head of Eurasia Research - Eurasia Program, Foreign Policy Research Institute Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Endowed Lecture The White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times, David E. Sanger has been a member of three Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist teams, including in 2017 for international reporting. His bestselling books include The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power; Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power; and The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age, which was adapted into an award-winning HBO documentary. Sanger is also a regular contributor to CNN and teaches national security policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In New Cold Wars, he offers an in-depth account of the United States' high-stakes struggles against two very dissimilar adversaries-Xi Jinping's China and Vladimir Putin's Russia. Colonel (Retired) Robert E. Hamilton, Ph.D., is the Head of Research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute's Eurasia Program and an Associate Professor of Eurasian Studies at the U.S. Army War College.  In a 30-year career in the U.S. Army, spent primarily as an Eurasian Foreign Area Officer, he served overseas in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Germany, Belarus, Qatar, Afghanistan, the Republic of Georgia, Pakistan and Kuwait.  He is the author of numerous articles and monographs on conflict and security issues, focusing principally on the former Soviet Union and the Balkans.  He is a graduate of the German Armed Forces Staff College and the U.S. Army War College and holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Military Academy, a Master's Degree in Contemporary Russian Studies and a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from the University of Virginia. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 4/18/2024)

The Middle East remains one of the world's most complicated, thorny—and, uncharitably, unstable—parts of the world, as countless headlines make clear. Internal strife, regional competition and external interventions have been the region's history for the past several decades. Robert Kaplan—author, foreign policy thinker, longtime writer on international affairs—has written about what he terms the “Greater Middle East”, a region that spans from the Mediterranean, south to Ethiopia and eastwards to Afghanistan and Pakistan, for decades. These insights are the foundation of his latest book: The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China (Random House, 2023) In his book, Kaplan criticizes how the U.S. has approached the region—intervention and regime change (including his own mea culpa for his previous support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, only for Washington to look somewhere else when newly-formed regimes inevitably disappoint. In this interview, Robert and I talk about his idea of the “Greater Middle East,” some of the experiences that most stood out to him, and his conclusions on how to think about democracy, order, and anarchy in this part of the world. Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of twenty books on foreign affairs and travel, including Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age (Random House: 2022), The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government's Greatest Humanitarian (Random House: 2021), The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (Random House: 2012), Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific (Random House: 2014), Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Random House: 2010), The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (Random House: 2000), and Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (St. Martins Press: 1993). He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and the U.S. Navy's Executive Panel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

2/2:  #Germany: #PRC: #EU: Germany's war troubles are Europe's war troubles. Antonia Colibasanu, Geopolitical Futures. @GPFutures. Foreign Policy Research Institute https://geopoliticalfutures.com/the-gravity-of-germanys-economic-problems/ 1918 Ukraine