The DSR Network

The most charitable interpretation of the events surrounding the Russian bounty scandal is that we have suffered a catastrophic breakdown in our policy processes. But the scandal likely reveals other, even larger, internal crises--a government wide set of leadership failures from COVID to the economy to social unrest to this national security scandal and, of course, the President's pattern of putt...

The Russian-Afghan bounty on allied troops scandal is rocking the White House. But it is actually many scandals in one. There is the scandal that Russia sought to pay to have US and allied forces killed, the scandal associated with the president's assertion he never heard about it, the scandal that exist if he did hear about it and didn't do anything about it, the compounding of that last scandal...

Have we ever seen an Attorney General so contemptuous of the law? A Department of Justice so dedicated to promulgating injustice? A judiciary so full of political hacks and incompetents? The U.S. justice system is broken and few weeks have illustrated that quite so well as the one just passed--from the effort to oust the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to a court ruling support...

We face an extraordinary challenge--a massive economic crisis and a great public health crisis, each feeding into one another. Our government's response thus far has exacerbated both. To recover is going to require big ideas and bold execution from the next president of the United States. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz offers some of those ideas and thoughts on how a Biden Administr...

To commemorate the beginning of summer, we take a look at the issues likely to dominate the headlines between now and Labor Day, from COVID to unrest in the streets, the economic crisis to potential cyberattacks, from foreign policy threats to the navel gazing of the narcissist-in-chief. We talk to Natasha Bertrand, national security correspondent for Politico, Chris Lu, former Cabinet Secretary a...

Everywhere you go, you get the sense that people are "over" COVID...except the hospitals that are filling up across the country. In fact, the anti-science populism of some political leaders and the short-attention span of some in the media are combining to make the next six months of the COVID crisis look potentially more deadly and more challenging than the last six months. How bad can it get? Wh...

John Bolton's book has Washington in a tizzy. Whether the rest of the country cares that much, whether anyone will see it as revelatory, whether it has any impact on the election and whether Bolton will ever see a penny of profit from it are all open questions. We discuss the book's aftershocks with David Sanger of the New York Times, Greg Sargent of the Washington Post and Ryan Goodman of "Just S...

In honor of three years of doing "Deep State Radio", the original gang of Rosa Brooks of Georgetown Law Center, Kori Schake of AEI and David Sanger of the New York Times join host David Rothkopf for a discussion of the biggest stories that have taken place during the past three years that have not involved the president of the US. That's right--an entirely He Who Shall Not Be Named-free episode! I...

Donald Trump says he's never even heard of Brett McGurk, but that's what he says whenever he feels jilted. On today's episode of Deep State Radio, Rosa Brooks stands in for David Rothkopf as host, and DSR regulars Ryan Goodman and David Sanger are joined by Brett McGurk, who hurt Trump's feelings very badly when he resigned as Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL in...

We are in a deep economic crisis today, the worst unemployment crisis since the Great Depression. While some recovery from the worst of the crisis is possible prior to the election, whomever takes office in 2021 will have major challenges before him. In this, the latest in our Agenda 2021 series of podcasts, we discuss how to tackle those challenges with the man who served as Chairman of Barack Ob...

According to economist Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard's Kennedy School, the economic crisis triggered by the COVID pandemic is going to be very different from any we have faced in memory. It will be different in scope, in severity, in what it may demand of afflicted governments, and in what it will demand of the global financial system. It is a massive problem and observes Hausmann, one of the world'...

If Parson Weems, who wrote of little George Washington's inability to tell a lie, were to write the story of Donald Trump and the cherry tree, you can bet that the president-to-be would be portrayed as saying "I would never lie, Father, I'm the hugest truth teller there is. And nobody has done more for cherry trees than me." Lying is what Trump does. It is who he is. And this week we have seen how...

There is no question that the Trump Administration has been a dramatic departure from past US Administrations on issues like democracy promotion, human rights and protecting press freedoms. Autocrats have been embraced. Press freedoms and free speech have been under siege here in the U.S. What would change if Joe Biden took office next January? In the second of our Agenda 2021 series, Amb. Derek M...

As if a public health catastrophe and an economic disaster were not enough, America is now rocked by the worst civil unrest in 50 years. And, to make matters worse, the president is...making matters worse. Wherever he can he is pouring gasoline onto the flames. Having declared the riots the result of the work of far-left "terrorists" Trump is seeking to militarize the racial, political and regiona...

America is re-opening. Whether we should be or not is beside the point. It is happening. So the question becomes how do we manage that re-opening and what risks may be emerging that we are ill-prepared for? Some are public health risks? Some have to do with adapting to a new way of life. In addition, just as we face the greatest public health crisis in a century, we witness the scene of a police o...

It is possible that in January 2021, America may welcome a president with more foreign policy experience than anyone who has assumed the office in more than three decades. That will be vitally important given the damage that Trump has done to our institutions, relationships and interests at home and abroad. In the first of our "Agenda 2021" series of podcasts exploring the priorities a new preside...

COVID has taken such a ghastly human and economic toll that people can speak of or think of little else. That's dangerous. Because opportunists and worse are seeking to take advantage of the fog of this moment to advance dangerous or unsavory agendas. From China moving against democracy in Hong Kong to Russia upping the ante in Libya, from Netanyahu planning illegal annexations of Palestinian terr...

We have a new Director of National intelligence who doesn't meet the minimum statutory requirements for holding the job. We have an administration that has become a disinformation engine. People are fired for telling or seeking the truth. We are actively dismantling the international system that we helped build and giving autocrats their way worldwide. Sometimes it all feels like more reality TV p...

Donald Trump likes to talk a lot about being a wartime president. But wartime presidents lead by example and inspire the country to set aside politics to focus on a common goal. This week, Trump is headed to Michigan to view how the state went from being the arsenal of democracy in the 40s to the "arsenal of health" today. According to Rep. Debbie Dingell who represents Michigan's 12th Congression...

In many ways, one of the unexpected side-effects of the COVID pandemic has been a rapid acceleration of the application of new technologies and the adaptation to technology driven new realities. From the ubiquity of Zoom to tele-medicine, from a focus on biotech to living our lives and conducting our work remotely, we've been given a taste of the world to come. On the heels of these changes are co...

Almost 40 million Americans have lost their jobs in the past 8 weeks. That is a quarter of the workforce. We have never faced a crisis like this one. How we choose to rebuild will be the decision that will define us all in history's eyes. Gene Sperling was the top White House economic advisor for both President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama. He has written a book that addresses the core...

In boxing, repeated body blows are seen as a way to bring down an adversary. We will soon see whether the repeated body blows the US economy and society have endured during this crisis will have the same effect on the Administration that is seen as having at the very least left the country undefended against them and that very likely exacerbated the impact of those blows. We discuss the state of t...

With more than 33 million people claiming unemployment insurance in the past six weeks, 75,000 reported dead of COVID, 1.3 million reported infected with the disease and an unprecedented social crisis that now has 1 in 5 mothers of young children fearing they will be unable to provide their children with the food they need, the U.S. faces its worst domestic crisis since the Civil War. The governme...

Sarah Kendzior's latest book "Hiding in Plain Sight" describes precisely why Donald Trump's failures as a leader, his support for our enemies and his profound corruption should not be a surprise to anyone. To Kendzior's many followers, it supports work she has been doing for years calling out the Trump backstory that the president, his supporters and his Russian sponsors have been trying to suppre...

We are joined on this special episode of DSR by Rep. Ted Deutch, a member of the House Foreign Affairs and Judiciary Committees as well as chairman of the Ethics Committee. Deutch has been actively leading efforts for more oversight into Jared Kushner and the Administration's management of the program to collect and distribute vital hospital supplies. He has also provided guidance to the White Hou...