Statecraft

Today's interviewee has been my white whale for a while. Edward Luttwak was born in 1942, and since then he's lived a wilder life than anyone I know. From Chairman Mao's funeral to late nights drinking with Putin, Luttwak's seen it all. Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (1:30) How to stage a coup in the 21st century (8:21) Why Luttwak is responsible for a global decline in coups (16:57) Iran’s real...

Brief intros: Nicholas Bagley was General Counsel to Governor Gretchen Whitmer . Kathy Stack served almost three decades at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Jenny Mattingley also served at the OMB, focusing on hiring reform and workforce efforts. Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (04:42) “I think all three of you have something to say about the Paperwork Reduction Act.” (12:38) A one-way...

I’ve been trying to get a conversation with today’s interviewee, Eric Van Gieson, PhD , since March. Van Gieson is a remarkable character, with a crazy CV: more than 25 years of experience in developing medical technology, and stints at multiple federal agencies including DARPA. A lot of people have spilled a lot of ink discussing what went wrong during COVID, but I think what Van Gieson lays out...

Today’s interviewee is Chris Anderson . Anderson’s a former DoD program manager who served in a unique organization called the US Army Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG). Anderson is currently the Chief Operating Officer at Troika Solutions, a defense consulting firm based in Virginia.   We discussed: The birth of the Asymmetric Warfare Group Why American troops in Afghanistan couldn’t strike Taliban...

I had the distinct pleasure of hosting Trae Stephens and Michael Kratsios on a panel in San Francisco in September on the topic of “Rebuilding the arsenal of democracy.” Trae Stephens is a general partner at Founders Fund and a Co-Founder of Anduril, a defense tech company that specializes in advanced autonomous systems. Michael Kratsios served as Chief Technology Officer of the United States in t...

Today’s episode is an interview with a colleague of mine at the Institute for Progress. Ben Jones is an economist who focuses on the sources of economic growth in advanced economies, and he’s a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at IFP. We recorded this conversation at the second #EconTwitterIRL Conference last month in Lancaster, PA, which IFP hosted alongside the Economic Innovation Group ). The other i...

Today, we spoke to Dr. Jeffrey Freeman, who directs the National Center for Disaster Medicine and Public Health (NCDMPH). Dr. Freeman leads a team that Congress has tasked with studying something called the National Disaster Medical System , which would coordinate how we treat casualties in the event of a hot war with a peer. Freeman worries that our on-paper system for distributing patients is li...

A few months ago, I read a great essay by Sid Jha on the Chevron doctrine. Sid had also written to me, saying he’d love a Statecraft interview about OIRA , the Office of Regulatory Affairs. It's the division of the Office of Management and the Budget that reviews all major regulations from agencies. I thought this was a great idea, and I asked if he'd be interested in co-hosting an episode with me...

This week’s interview is a live recording of a panel I hosted three weeks ago at the Bottlenecks Conference in San Francisco, with Sam Hammond and Jen Pahlka. We discussed: (00:00) Introduction (00:39) Do the right and left disagree about state capacity? (7:50) Will AI make the whole state capacity debate obsolete? (11:05) What cues should today’s reformers take from the Progressive Era? (14:19) S...

Today’s interviewee, Jonathan Luff , was a British diplomat for more than a decade, and worked on the British bid for the 2018 World Cup in the Prime Minister’s office. Timestamps: [00:00] Introduction [00:21] How do you bid for the World Cup? [11:37] Was the UK too naive to win a bid? [20:52] Does British soft power still matter? [23:51] What are the bottlenecks to British economic growth? [31:37...

Today's episode is about how the government procures military equipment. There’s a growing Washington consensus that we simply can’t buy the weapons we need, in the quantities we need, on the timelines we need. To better understand what’s going wrong, we talked to Dr. Arun Seraphin . Seraphin just finished serving as a commissioner on a 14-person “blue ribbon commission” to investigate reforms to...

Today’s interviewee, James Phillips , was formerly the science and tech adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson. An acclaimed systems neuroscientist, Phillips helped develop the UK’s rapid COVID testing and helped create the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) . We discussed: Dominic Cummings’ band of “weirdos and misfits” Red-teaming Westminster Why you should always be willing to resig...

For the anniversary of the newsletter, I talk to Daniel Golliher of maximumnewyork.com about how Statecraft works, what we've learned, and the year ahead. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Today’s interviewee is Matt Lira , who has held a wide range of insider roles on the Hill and White House. Our topic: Why Congress is so technologically weak, and how that can change. We discussed: * Why is Congress so slow to adopt technologies that would significantly ease operations? * How did a Congressman unilaterally introduce live-streaming of Congressional hearings? * Would a Google Docs-s...

Russ Vought served as the director of President Trump’s Office of Management and the Budget (OMB) . When the OMB under Vought withheld military aid from Ukraine, House Democrats initiated an investigation that ultimately led to Trump’s first impeachment. Vought now leads a think tank, the Center for Renewing America , and is reportedly building a “180-day playbook” for implementing a policy agenda...

Today, I spoke to Ernie Tedeschi , former Chief Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers (These days he’s Director of Economics at The Budget Lab ). Timestamps: [00:00]“Fighting the last war” in stimulus packages [00:23] What’s driving inflation [11:59] The tools CEA economists have [16:45] The tools CEA economists wish they had [33:50] Are high interest rates driving low consumer sentiment?...

The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) helped bring Moderna’s mRNA vaccine through clinical trials to market. BARDA’s Division of Research, Innovation, and Ventures (DRIVe) is its in-house biotech venture capital firm, charged with identifying and incubating technologies for U.S. biodefense and preparedness. Today's interviewee is Dr. Sandeep Patel , the Director of DRI...

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is the world’s largest emergency supply of crude oil. In huge underground salt caverns along the Gulf of Mexico, the American federal government can store up to 714 million barrels, more than what the country uses in one month. Historically, the SPR has been tapped at the discretion of the president when natural disasters or crises cause the price of oil for consume...

In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a major stroke. The president, a widower, was kept in solitude by his second wife and a tight ring of advisers. For months, senior executive branch and legislative officials could not see the president. The White House claimed the president would shortly return to full health, and that he suffered only from “nervous exhaustion.” His wife managed the flow...

In April and May 1979, between 66 and 300 people died from anthrax in the Russian city of Sverdlovsk, now called Yekaterinburg. The Soviet authorities seized doctors’ records and quickly rolled out an explanation: the deaths were an accident caused by contaminated meat. But American intelligence agencies suspected a more nefarious explanation: the Soviets were secretly developing biological weapon...

In 1969, President Nixon announced the end of all American offensive biological weapons programs, and renounced the first use of chemical weapons. But it wasn’t until several months later that Nixon confirmed that the U.S. would end all military research into toxins, which can be created either in nature or in the lab. Nixon chose to end that toxin research because of one man, our interviewee toda...

Most Americans have never heard of the Domestic Policy Council. What is it, and why does it matter?  Today, we interviewed Cecilia Muñoz , former Director of the Domestic Policy Council under President Obama. We cover: Why did the Biden presidential transition differ sharply from the Obama transition? How do you stop bureaucrats from slow-walking policies they dislike? What decisions never make th...

Today's interviewee, Professor Chris Snyder, is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Institute for Progress (IFP). He teaches economics at Dartmouth College, where he specializes in industrial organization and microeconomic theory. He is also a research associate at the NBER, treasurer of the Industrial Organization Society, and a faculty director for the University of Chicago's Market Shaping Acce...

Today, we talked to Laura Thomas , a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officer and Chief of Base in Afghanistan. She has served over 17 years in national security and leadership roles. We discuss: 00:00 How a CIA station operates 8:46 What kind of intelligence failure was October 7th? 24:39 Why did intelligence agencies predict Kabul would fall quickly to the Taliban? 30: 09 The holes...

When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, hundreds of tons of nuclear materials were suddenly unsecured. The new, fragile Russian government had no ability or desire to claim facilities in formerly Soviet states, and it could no longer pay nuclear plant workers. Operatives from rogue states offered cash to purchase uranium and higher nuclear physicists. Today we talked to Andy Weber, one of the American...