Chatter

Creators of science fiction movies and television shows often build worlds with at least some attention to governance systems and international (or interplanetary) political interactions. Sometimes, they develop central plot points out of national security matters, even if they play out in entirely different galaxies or dimensions. So it's not surprising that political scientist and author Stephen...

Gaming might seem far removed from national security, but Volko Ruhnke's experience proves otherwise. During his career as an intelligence analyst and manager, he designed and published many commercially successful historical board games that, in turn, informed his work. Additionally, he applied his skills in gaming to training intelligence officers. David Priess hosted Volko for a deep dive about...

Kori Schake is the Director of Foreign and Defense Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. She has also worked in policy positions at the State Department, the Defense Department and the White House, taught at West Point, and more recently, served on the commission tasked with renaming military bases named for confederate figures. She sat down with Lawfare's editor in chief Ben Wittes, to tal...

Political scientist Ethan Scheiner appeared on Chatter in early 2022, right before the Olympics in Beijing, to talk about the fascinating intersection of politics, security, and Olympic events. This week, he returns to talk about the compelling connections between hockey and international relations--with a special focus on Czechoslovakia before, during, and after the Cold War. His new book, Freedo...

This week, Shane sits down with law professor and hacker historian Scott Shapiro to rant, and rave, about hacker movies. From  War Games  to the  Die Hard  franchise to TV’s “Mr. Robot,” Hollywood has portrayed hackers as heroes and villains. Sometimes filmmakers get the art and culture of hacking right. Sometimes they get basic technology very wrong. But the results are almost...

Since joining Lawfare in November 2021, Roger Parloff has been a constant presence at the January 6th trials. Now based in Washington, D.C, he had, earlier in his career, served as a staff writer for Fortune and American Lawyer Magazine, and has been published in The New York Times, Yahoo Finance, ProPublica, New York,  NewYorker.com , and Air Mail News. As a senior editor at Lawfare, he's fo...

Water, essential to the emergence and endurance of life on Earth, has both spurred technological advances and driven many types of conflict. For the first time in humanity's long history with water, we are starting to suffer the consequences of widespread unsustainable water use, and we soon will face a crucial collective choice about what future generations' interactions with water will look like...

Shane and David have hosted many former intelligence officers, mostly of the American variety, during more than 80 episodes so far on Chatter . But, until this week, you haven't heard us speak with one who has turned her intelligence experience into a career as a professional genealogist. Lisa Maddox of Family History Investigations has carved out that unique path, and her story reveals much about...

Alicia Wanless is one of the pioneers of the idea of information ecology, the notion that we should think about information and disinformation as part of a complex ecosystem, the management of which she analogizes to environmental policy. Wanless has been complaining for several years that the war on “disinformation” skates over important question: What are the collateral effects of anti-disinform...

From the birth of the republic, American presidents have communicated with the public in one form or another. The frequency and exact nature of such efforts have varied quite a bit over time due to variables ranging from the extent of partisanship in the media to each commander in chief's personal preference to travel technology. Political scientist Anne Pluta has explored this history deeply, inc...

On April 13, 2022, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes conducted his first “special military operation” at the Russian embassy in Washington, DC. It involved 14 theater stage lights that Wittes and other activists used to project images of the Ukrainian flag onto embassy walls. Since then, Wittes’s special military operations have garnered increa...

Olivia Nuzzi gets Washington in a way many journalists don’t. As the Washington correspondent for New York magazine, she has written perceptive, piercing, and enduring portraits of Donald Trump and the bizarre characters in his orbit. Now she’s turning her reporter’s eye to history, hosting a companion podcast to HBO's “White House Plumbers,” a five-part series that imagines the Watergate scandal...

Private equity firms rank among the largest employers in the United States and invest many billions of dollars in a wide variety of industries. Yet the public understanding of how private equity works and its impact on myriad areas of American life, including national security, remains limited. Brendan Ballou is trying to change that. A federal prosecutor who works in the Antitrust Division of the...

As satellites around the planet proliferate, the tug they feel from international tensions seems to rival the gravitational pull exerted by the Earth itself. On issues from Space Traffic Management to scientific data sharing, the need for global cooperation is high but rarely easy. Dr. Mariel Borowitz is head of the Program on International Affairs, Science, and Technology at Georgia Tech's Sam Nu...

Widespread power outages have happened before, but authorities usually diagnose the cause and restore electricity within days, if not within hours. And with few exceptions, such blackouts occur without dissolving social bonds and prompting massive violence. In big screen and television fiction, however, things are different. Thrillers show us the dangerous, life-or-death scenarios that can arise w...

Nancy Youssef has reported on war and conflict around the world and from Washington. As a young journalist, she went to Iraq and sensed early on that a war most presumed would be over quickly was only just beginning. Her career has taken her to Afghanistan, Egypt, and into the center of power at the Pentagon. Nancy is now a national security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.  In...

Since the days of the USSR, the Russian people have expressed dissatisfaction with the quality of the country's environment. The post-Soviet years witnessed an explosion of grassroots, professional, and government-affiliated groups to advocate in this space, but widespread public support and lasting impact on government policy haven't developed. And now, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, pros...

Misperceptions about nuclear proliferation attempts abound, particularly when we find authoritarian leaders involved. It is easy to picture these determined owners of nuclear weapons as omnipotent, unconstrained micromanagers--willing and able to do whatever is necessary to take their country over the threshold. Political scientist Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer disagrees. She conducted extensive resear...

A former president accused of treason. Talk of secession. Concerns about the lack of accountability for insurrection. These issues appear in headlines today, but we've been here before--in the 1860s. For this episode, David Priess talked with legal historian Cynthia Nicoletti about her passion for the intersection of history and law, what the U.S. Constitution says and does not say about secession...

The Academy loves a good spy flick, and so do we! This week, Shane Harris talks with Washington Post culture critic Alyssa Rosenberg about the enduring power of espionage on the big screen.  Movies like Zero Dark Thirty , the Mission: Impossible franchise, and this year’s Top Gun: Maverick and All Quiet on the Western Front , which both took home Oscars, help us understand global conflict as...

Mark Hertling retired from the U.S. Army as a lieutenant general a decade ago, but he's kept busy since then as a CNN military analyst, hospital organization executive, book author, speaker on leadership, and adjunct professor. Most recently, he accepted President Biden's appointment as Chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission. Celebrating its 100th anniversary this month, the commissi...

For the past 20 years, Richard Haass has led the Council on Foreign Relations, building on his national security experience in government and his related work in academia and think tanks. Although his efforts have focused overwhelmingly on foreign policy, his central concern has turned to something closer to home: the decline of democratic norms in the United States. He's even written a new book a...

James Fallows on What is Happening in the Sky  It’s been an eventful few months for flying objects. A Chinese spy balloon captured national attention and sparked an international incident--and a lot of hot air. But closer to the ground, there have been two near collisions of commercial jets at U.S. airports. This week, Shane talks to journalist (and pilot) James Fallows about “What the hell i...

Along with co-editors Peter Feaver, William Inboden, and Meghan O'Sullivan, former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley is editor of the new Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama . This unique and massive book contains 30 Transition Memos prepared in 2008-2009 under Hadley's direction by the outgoing George W. Bush administration’s National Security Council staff f...

Flat earth beliefs have been spreading alarmingly in recent years. They offer plenty of fodder for punchlines, yes--but they also have ties to more nefarious conspiracy theories like QAnon and to other manifestations of political extremism. As a reporter at the Daily Beast , Kelly Weill has been covering it all. And she has written Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Wi...