The DSR Network

It's that time of day. The sun is setting. You're a little parched. Maybe more than a little due to the fireball on the horizon. What's just the right cocktail for the moment? On this episode of Deep State Radio we speak with nuclear weapons specialist and amateur bartender Jeffrey Lewis about his new book "The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks on the United States." We di...

The release of Bob Woodward's book "Fear" and the recent anonymous oped in the New York Times claiming to be by a senior official who is mounting the resistance to Trump from within the administration raise important questions about what is the best way to stop the threat posed by an unfit president. Our panel, Rosa Brooks of Georgetown, Mieke Eoyang of Third Way and Kori Schake of IISS offer an e...

Brick by brick the Trump team is not building a wall, it's dismantling the international order. The latest move--an attack on the International Criminal Court by National Security Advisor John Bolton. Should you care? Isn't this just an inside baseball attack on some other acronym that probably doesn't work that well to begin with? Or is it a signal of something more, something bigger, maybe even...

Every report out of the Trump White House tells the same story. Whether it's the anonymous op-ed from a "senior Trump Administration official" in the New York Times or Bob Woodward's book "Fear" or the Omarosa book or the Wolff book or countless news reports--the president's unhinged, the people around him don't trust him, and some of them have decided to just by-pass the president and govern on t...

The White House is a shambles. The president is an object of ridicule among his closest aides. The Congress is looking the other way seeming to want to rush a Supreme Court nominee into office before the President is himself hustled before a judge. But that's not the worst of it. Dysfunction in Washington leads to big problems worldwide. This week, our panel including commentator and analyst Rula...

In a brilliant bit of turnabout, John McCain's last act was to use his own funeral to bury Donald Trump. By excluding him from the ceremonies and featuring leaders of both parties extolling values and virtues alien to Trump, McCain made an eloquent point. But will it have any lasting impact? Within just a couple of days the President was back Tweeting, his Supreme Court nominee was being rammed in...

Donald Trump's track record as an international deal-maker is perfect. He still has not made one major deal of any sort anywhere with anyone (except maybe with a nice gentleman in Moscow, but we'll leave that be for now.). He has undone a bunch of deals--from the Paris Accord to TPP to the Iran nuclear deal. He has announced some deals that weren't really deals--from the "breakthrough" with North...

Donald Trump has wrapped himself so tightly in the flag he could be America’s first July 4th mummy but while his true colors may be red white and blue it increasingly appears they may look more like the Russian flag than Old Glory. First, he showed this when at a school appearance he was unable to color in a flag properly. Next, despite all his attack on NFL-ers for disrespecting the flag, he brok...

While the intelligence and law enforcement communities reel from the president's attacks, Donald Trump has sent further signals that he expects personal loyalty above loyalty to the nation from all of his team across the whole of government. He has even go so far as to trash the once hallowed concept of independence of the Fed. But it may be that the biggest problem affecting the government is not...

This week in important Steven Tyler news, the Aerosmith front man demanded that Donald Trump stop playing his band's song "Livin' on the Edge" at their rallies. And he makes a good point. Trump is past that point and may want to consider more appropriate alternatives for upcoming rallies, like "I Fought the Law (And the Law Won)" or "Jailhouse Rock." Certainly, that seemed to be the message prosec...

As reports have come in of Russia escalating its attacks on American democracy, our President has hopped into action escalating his war against the people who are protecting us from the Russians. Trump has begun a campaign of stripping security clearances from America's most experience national security officials in an effort to punish them for disloyalty. Our experts, Susan Hennessey of Lawfare,...

With great fanfare Donald Trump did the presidential equivalent of stuffing a pair of athletic socks down his pants and announced the new defense spending bill. It was, as might be expected, yuge. Once again we will outspend China by four or five times and Russia by perhaps a dozen times. Are we safer? Does it matter that if we spend that much we can't have the schools, roads and health care syste...

Nothing is more core to the life of the Deep State than marking documents classified. After all, if just anyone could read them, who'd want to? On the other hand, if documents are classified, they can't be shared which is a bit of a problem in the cyber era when our most important defenses may be in the private sector. What's a secret-loving country to do? The NY Times' David Sanger, Georgetown Un...

Summer Reading Edition: On this special episode of a podcast so special it doesn't need special episodes but can't help doing them anyway, we delve into the world of books. Georgetown's Rosa Brooks, IISS' Kori Schake and the Financial Times Ed Luce reveal what they're reading, what they're avoiding, why they are academic pariahs, what sucks and what sucks so bad they don't even feel comfortable di...

Did you know that Ed Luce was once on a cricket team that Imran Khan occasionally would coach during breaks in his high profile high society dating life? That Rosa Brooks briefly played on a cricket team at Oxford? That Kori went to a cricket match and was not bored to tears? Well, you will if you listen to this episode of Deep State Radio which also has the president admitting to a felony, Americ...

In which we start with cricket get to Imram Khan, discuss how hunky he was as a young cricketer and how his populism and the nukes he now controls may make him somewhat less attractive. Then on to the expanding realm of hybrid warfare, what it means in Clausewitzian terms, what that may all mean in terms of Metternich and then of inevitably, on to the proliferation of vegetables of mass destructio...

In the latest Deep State Radio our friends Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University, Kori Schake of IISS and Evelyn Farkas of the Atlantic Council offer secrets into how they remain so well-informed. It all turns on fiction, apparently and those who remember what they read last will tell you what it was. Then we turn to Trump, Italy's new prime minister, a whole slew of lies and misstatements from Tru...

If only someone had told us that Trump has distrusted alliances and the international order his whole life, that he was close to Russia and Russians, that he was unhinged and wholly unqualified for the presidency! If only we had known! Maybe then we would not be inviting Vladimir Putin to come to the White House to give him a hero's welcome commemorating his successful 2016 election hack...just in...

A lonely old man wandering the White House late at night in his bathrobe, perhaps with a half-eaten McDonald's cheeseburger in his pocket gets angry at the world...so angry that he hits the ALL CAPS button on his cellphone and starts to Tweet out threats at a foreign nation. "ALL CAPS?," says his target, "this means WAR!" That's very nearly where we were this week when Donald Trump lashed out at I...

As Richard Nixon might have said, "What are we going to do when we don't have Western Civilization to kick around any more?" Things happen fast in this bad old world and a few years is a enough time for the wheels to come flying off the damn cart. And if you don't get our point, that may have been a wheel that went flying by on Monday in Helsinki. Our panel of IISS' Kori Schake, Georgetown Law Sch...

Donald Trump completed the most unsuccessful foreign trip of any president since Theodore Roosevelt, who took the first foreign trip, with a disastrous summit for the ages. Critics on the right and left called it an embarrassment, a disaster, or worse. And honestly, it was all that and more. A turning point in the history of US foreign policy perhaps. Our experts, Georgetown's Rosa Brooks, IISS' K...

If, as Sarah Huckabee Sanders alleged, it was a lousy breakfast that had White House Chief of Staff squirm while President Donald Trump kicked off the NATO Summit with an attack on Germany, then someone needs to get a Denny's Grand Slam to Rosa Brooks, Julie Smith and Ed Luce pronto. Because as our great panel looked back on Trump's NATO performance, they certainly did more than just shift uneasil...

With America's foreign policy savant, our president leaving the country this week it's easy to understand the fireworks and celebrations last week. Now we get to share him with the rest of the world--including our NATO allies, the keepers of our special relationship with England, the patrons of a Trump resort in Scotland (ancestral home of his immigrant mother) and then with the main man in his li...

The GOP could win in November and maintain its hold on both houses of Congress. Which Donald Trump would find encouraging. And might lead him to be even more like...himself. And that might lead his base to re-elect him. And we could have six and a half more years of Trump. So...what would that look like? Is there enough box wine in the world to help you get through this? Who knows? It can be an ex...

50 years ago the multilateral agreement that kept us all from blowing ourselves to smithereens was signed. And look, we're not smithereens, so that's good, right? On the other hand...North Korea. And Iran. And a president who wants new nukes that are smaller and easier to use. So, there's that. We discuss. You should listen. With Rosa Brooks, Joe Cirincione and Kori Schake. Tune in. Support this s...